• by April 7, 2006

Online video is hot, so they say. As media planners scramble toward the broadcast and cable TV upfronts, perhaps they should take online video more seriously.

We recently came across an online video broadcast company called The Fifth Network (TFN). TFN is an aggregator of high-quality video content and works to enable advertisers to achieve the right kind of reach and relevance for campaigns with video. The company occupies the nascent video network space along with such firms as Brightcove, Broadband Enterprises, and InStream.

TFN's spin on the video network space is to work only with publishers of approved, quality content. But what exactly does this mean? The big difference between TFN and other video networks is that TFN holds its publishers to a strict set of criteria when evaluating both the content and video playback experience, according to Tom Bosco, TFN's COO. Bosco is the former director of broadband sales development at AOL, and before that, served on the MSNBC.com team that launched MSN Video.

"The Internet has been booming with creative content thanks to widespread broadband, but we need quality standards when it comes to selling the experience to advertisers," Bosco tells The Minute. TFN, he says, works with publishers who understand that "standards" and "creative freedom" are complements, not mutually exclusive. "We work with them to help better monetize their content," says Bosco.

The startup's publishers include United Online, Axis Television, Hollywood.com, and TurnHere.com. TFN tries to aggregate niche content in areas other than music and news where online video is predominant. In addition to aggregating content, TFN requires a dedicated number of impressions per month (ranging from one million to 50 million impressions) from its publisher partners. It then packages the inventory and brands it by vertical category such as "TFN Living," "TFN News," and "TFN Sports."

One of the most common complaints in the online marketplace is "there's no inventory." Publishers say they're sold out. Smoke and mirrors? Maybe. But perhaps it's a question of a shortage of scalable online inventory, particularly outside of music and news. Bosco says certain types of content like lifestyle and travel-related content have scale challenges. But marketers can get to niche content and take advantage of it.

A marketer, for example, say, America Express, runs against online music and news content but wants to complement a campaign with advertising on travel-related sites. TFN would go out and comb the Internet and find reach and relevance. "We find high quality content and we find a lot of inventory," Bosco says of TFN's aggregation.

Marketers targeting men 18 to 34 find that there's not a lot of video inventory to target that group in, for example, extreme sports content. TFN is able to package 20 to 30 sites in the extreme sports category that meet its content criteria and video playback criteria. If the site doesn't have a good playback experience, TFN offers its proprietary video player.

"The real key is to find high quality content. We have a lot of inventory in very niche-like sites," Bosco adds. "We go out there and find sites that have great content, and then we score reach and relevance for the advertiser."

Reach and relevance are surely the name of the game in the online video waters. The aim of companies like TFN is to make online video buys easier for media planners. "The challenge for us is to convince the media community that we have quality content and a quality playback experience across our network."

From now through October, TFN says it will bring 150 million to 175 million viable in-stream video impressions online per month.

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