(By Brindaa Lakshmi & Vikas SN)
It looks like Rammohan Sundaram’s PlatformPlay is on a roll – The company now inked an exclusive deal with the digital media technology company BrizzTV to be its monetization partner in India. This is the third partnership PlatformPlay has inked during the month, after a partnership with AOL to bring TechCrunch events to India and a partnership with NLPCaptcha to monetize the entire sales inventory of the company.
According to the company statement, BrizzTV has developed a new advertising platform called ‘Google Ads on Broadcast TV’, which will allow brands to advertise non-video ads directly on DTH television from Internet. Advertisers can upload the creatives on their website and choose the geographies in which the campaign should be seen along with the campaign starting and ending date. The company also claims to provide an option for brands to use multiple creatives together which would self-rotate during the campaign period.
Ad-Supported Model On DTH: What’s particularly interesting is that BrizzTV’s AngelList listing suggests that it will be using this platform to show users content from unsubscribed channels while showing display ads on the side. This is quite different from the existing DTH system, where users will have to subscribe to any channel to view its content. That being said, it will be interesting to see if the company is able to generate significant revenue through this ad-supported model.
Social Integration: Besides this, BrizzTV also plans to include live social conversations about specific shows on TV, however the company didn’t disclose any specific information on this. Its worth noting that several channels like MTV, Times Now and SET Max (during IPL 6) have started featuring tweets on their television channels. Disney UTV’s Bindass also offers a Facebook app called Bindass Facebook Jukebox that allows Facebook users to vote and dedicate songs to their friends on TV, which is then played on Bindass at a specific time, along with a real time feed of Facebook comments alongside the song.
Founded in May 2010, Bangalore-based BrizzTV had secured an undisclosed amount in a series-A funding from Ojas Venture Partners in Feb 2012. It had also partnered with Airtel Digital TV to deploy its interactive test preparation service iExam on Airtel’s DTH service in March 2012.
