• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 13, 2015

With more publishers of all sizes hoping to tap into lucrative online video advertising, technical challenges remain, including the need to distribute video content in formats compatible with a range of devices, complicated by the shift from Adobe Flash to HTML5.

However, a number of relatively new tech firms are moving to simplify the process with cross-channel video distribution platforms.

On that note, this week Likqid Media officially announced the launch of LKQD, which helps publishers serve video ads across multiple devices and formats, including mobile apps, mobile Web sites, desktop computers and Internet-connected TVs.

The LKQD player is based on HTML5, and therefore compatible with any screen using the markup language, including cross-platform mobile apps. It also simplifies the process of transitioning Flash-based video ads to HTML5.

Publishers can access LKQD through a self-serve interface, manage and execute ads compatible with different formats, and track performance through a real-time reporting system.

According to Likqid, following its beta launch last year, the LKQD platform has already been adopted by over 120 companies around the world for video ads and processes over 10 billion ad requests per day, the majority of them for mobile devices. In the U.S. alone it claims its mobile video ads reach 230 million consumers.

A recent report from eMarketer found that advertisers are eager to adopt mobile video ads, but deterred by a number of obstacles, including the variety of mobile video ad formats and uncertainty over the differences between mobile apps and mobile Web channels.

Still, eMarketer expects these issues to be addressed in the near future, and forecasts total mobile video ad spend to grow from $2.62 billion this year to $6.86 billion by 2019. As a proportion of total digital video spend, over this period mobile will rise from a third to almost half (47.7%).