• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, December 10, 2013

Pretty clearly, a large and growing portion of the video watching universe is getting its cues from social media. It's the most necessary place to be. With that in mind, Unicorn Media is expanding its Unicorm Once solution that facilitates dynamic ad insertion on those so-called Twitter Player Cards, the video content embed display you probably see when you tweet. It's a pretty awesome bit of tech.

 Those player cards give content publisher a little graphical oomph when they distribute on Twitter, just like Facebook does when a user plugs in a video or some other material you are sharing.

Now Unicorn Once lets publisher ingest live or VOD content just once (hence the name) and deliver it to the known universe of IP connected devices, with just one URL for all of them. And perhaps most alluring to marketers, the Unicorn Once solution allows dynamically inserted ads anywhere in the stream. That means a publisher can insert an ad before or within a video, or after the clip so it will show up virtually instantly. It’s all server based so there’s no software development kits or plug-ins.

So that, for example, the users calling up a just-concluded sports highlight clip from some allegedly big game can do it anywhere in the world.

  “When everybody wants to see highlights from that Auburn game, we’re able to personalize the monetization of it,” says David Morel, chief strategy officer for Tempe-based Unicorn. “In our customer base, we’re talking several hundred million ad impressions a month right out of the gate.”

Because Twitter ends up being almost a news (or sports, or gossip) news site for many users, Unicorn’s ability to work the Twitter Cards, and deliver ads via those cards to all platforms is the kind of ad opportunity Morel and Unicorn think will it pay instant dividends for "live" sensitive content, but not only that. Unicorn Once is already being used by NBC News and ABC News and TMZ and a sports entity Morel can’t name--but I’m guessing you could figure out with one clue: It’s big.

 Unicorn Once has no real competitor in that exact Twitter Card space, though Morel concedes publishers could try to build their own. Instead, Morel supposes a lot of interest from publishers now that Unicorn is expanding Once’s availability. “When publishers see the opportunity for monetization of very fresh content, I think they’ll be able to paint the picture pretty quickly,” Morel says. “It’s good for them and it’s good for Twitter.”

 But what Unicorn is really excited about, Morel says, is the connected TV future, when the solution might be particularly the right thing for the right moment in time, as more consumers interact with two-screens in a kind of interactive duet that.  So many dreams. We’ll see.

pj@mediapost.com