• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, February 2, 2016

Video publishers were surprised when Facebook announced it would close its LiveRail ad-serving product early last month. Now, Ooyala is positioning itself to fill the void by waiving all migration costs for former LiveRail customers that transition to Ooyala’s supply-side platform, Pulse.

In a blog post on Feb. 1, Ooyala’s SVP of ad tech Sorosh Tavakoli noted the implications for video publishers of Facebook's move. He conjectured that LiveRail’s focus would “shift towards larger and more premium publishers. The signs now clearly show Facebook is leaving the business of providing software and tools for publishers altogether.”

In the post, Tavakoli said this was “bad news for video publishers” because they don’t have much choice when it comes to video-dedicated platforms on which to operate their business: “Now there’s even less choice and competition.”

But Facebook’s pullout also leaves an opening for Ooyala, which is clearly poised to take advantage of it by luring former LiveRail customers to its platform. Tavakoli told Real-Time Daily that migration costs can range anywhere from $10k to $100k, depending on the scale of the publisher, the number of integrations they have into different video players and devices, as well as the number of integrations into third-party viewability partners.

“The complexity of each customer is different and the costs are different. Basically, you’re ripping out one platform and inserting a new one. Migrating a publisher’s campaigns can be fairly overwhelming from a technical and operational perspective,” Tavakoli said.

LiveRail, he said, had about 100 customers, many of whom Ooyala had worked with in various capacities. To date, the company has signed several former LiveRail customers. It’s doing outreach via an email marketing campaign and the blog post.