StartUp Beat

Web Site: www.overlay.tv
Headquarters: Ottawa, Canada
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Rob Lane, CEO; Tyler Cope, Chief Architect; Nadav Zin, Vice President Products and Services
Investors: Celtic House Venture Partners, EdgeStone Capital Partners and Tech Capital Partners
Employees: 20
Total Capital Raised: $4.6 Million
Company News: blog.overlay.tv/press/

By Tyler Cope, Founder and Chief Architect

Overlay.TV is an interactive media company that provides a video commerce platform that enables Internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets by overlaying contextual information directly onto online video content and linking to external websites.

Choice - Opt-In 

The original idea for Overlay.TV was conceived while watching my wife watch TV.  She would sit down to a line-up of shows that had been PVR’d the night before and be delighted with the fact that the next few hours of her evening would be spent happily viewing the shows she had selected.  Of course, there would be the occasional commercial interruption that she would fast forward through but at least it wasn’t like the bad old days where she was forced to sit through several minutes of advertisements.

My wife wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.  Everyone I know has their own variation of on-demand content consumption.  Some people pause a show when it starts, make dinner and then resume viewing when dinner is done, allowing them to skip past all the commercial breaks.  With the Internet-oriented method of viewing content, users also shun the “traditional” advertising.  Banners, pop-ups and the like have very low click through rates and the minute that a video sharing site introduces the television model of interrupting content to show an ad, many of their users become upset and simply move on.  The common attribute among these viewers is that they are watching content without paying any attention to the advertising.  Traditional advertising models have not kept up with advances in technology and are severely broken.  Any new model would need to work in the world where the user expects to watch what they want, when they want it. This was the first ingredient for the idea.

The Content is The Ad

The second ingredient was this: Although people will choose to disregard the interruptive type of advertising that has been chosen for them, product placement is still partially working. My wife will watch a video or show and make a comment about the shoes, handbags, hairstyles or the lifestyles of the rich and famous. She might simply be curious about what an item is or she may actually be interested in buying something just like it.

Given the right timing, the right mood and the opportunity to dig deeper into what is being shown, these people would most certainly either read more about or purchase items on the spot. If the mood or timing isn’t perfect, they might just set the thought aside for another day. If only they knew exactly what thought to set aside. 

Users

Assuming that you could come up with an unobtrusive system that allowed people to delve into what they were watching, how would that system know what the objects in the video are? Artificial Intelligence isn’t even close to being able to identify objects in video at the detailed level required. Viewers want to know what brand, where it can be purchased and what is comparable. To do that, you need either the people that were involved in creating the content or people who know about the subject matter. That leads me to the third ingredient: the users. 

Users would be able to identify, classify, tag and comment on objects inside the content.