Comcast unit unveils all-digital distribution

Radiance, a division of Comcast Media Center, today announced a software-based solution to automate distribution of digital advertising over the Internet, in both standard and high-definition (HD) formats, to enable advertisers, agencies and post-production houses to more easily and cost-effectively distribute ads for insertion to cable companies, broadcasters and telco video providers.

The Radiance solution, which was acquired by Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA), is used today by enterprises and has now been incorporated into the Comcast Media Center content delivery and management engines, said Gary Traver, senior vice president and chief operating officer for Comcast Media Center. This new approach simplifies distribution of ads, particularly HD ads, eliminating the need for physical delivery of tapes, and makes the process more cost-effective, Traver said. By automating the process, Comcast Media Center is also helping pave the way to more targeted ads, since ad content can be more cost effectively distributed to serve smaller demographic or geographic groups, Traver said.

“We think that we are the first to do it the way we are doing it – using a lightweight software application,” Traver said. “Radiance has an existing product called True Delivery which delivers reliably and efficiently over the public Internet. Global enterprise customers have integrated it in with their own software to run internal enterprise-based applications that distribute huge content files using the public Internet and take the content country to country. We have incorporated their capability into our engines, and we built a service out of the two products. Instead of Radiance being used for a single enterprise client, we are putting in applications on a many-to-many format to serve post-production houses and ad agencies on the content side and end-users – cable, broadcast, telco video providers – the other side.”

The new product, AdDelivery, will replace labor-intensive manual processes such as delivering HD ads on tape and is compatible with emerging standards. Radiance technology is able to optimize the delivery of content, based on the available bandwidth, Traver said, and has the ability as well to track how much content is delivered and know where to pick up on content delivery in the event of any type of problem, eliminating retransmission in the event of a line or system failure.

About 3% of today’s ads are HD, but those ads account for 20% of the distribution costs, because HD is generally more expensive to deliver, Traver said. “If you do a cost comparison of where we are versus what alternatives are, we are a small fraction of the cost of what the alternatives are, particularly when you get to HD,” he said. “We expect the HD volume is going up, and we are hoping to facilitate that by giving a different cost model.”  

The product was designed with interactive TV in mind, Traver said. Comcast Media Center has a product called ITS Access that can facilitate delivering interactive applications to small and medium-sized markets, he said.

“Because we have a very strong legacy of working in interactive television, when we looked at what it is going to take to make advanced advertising work, we know our capabilities are going to help facilitate that,” Traver said.”It’s not just a matter of capabilities in the distribution area but also content feeding mechanisms that allow for continuous low-cost delivery.”