New York — Struggling to keep with the advancement AOL is rolling out a new version of its connected TV app, AOL On Network, is getting a new look and expanding to more platforms with a new video ad-serving capability, the company said over the weekend.
Interestingly, the latest version 2.0 of its connected TV app will now be available on Samsung Electronics Smart TVs, Sony Electronics and Roku over-the-top devices, adding the ability to serve pre-roll ads against 380,000-plus short-form video clips. The app will also be available in a beta phase on TiVo through its premiere DVRs.
For a company that has always been online and more recently embarked into mobile, AOL hopes the connected TV space will live up to its early projections for rampant growth and provide it with an opportunity to round out its cross-platform, multi-device strategy.
AOL On TV app for Samsung and TiVo
“The new interface features news, entertainment, food, and home channels,” says Rob DelaCruz, AOL’s general manager for connected TV and mobile video. The app offers access to over 380,000 video clips from AOL creators and now includes content from third-party content partners like Reuters, AP, BBC, Newsy, Entertainment Tonight, Sugar, E!, Splash News, CNET and Gourmet TV. The app will gain over 100 new clips every day, DelaCruz says. He points to the app’s home screen, “a rich canvas of images that resonates on a large screen” as providing a fun and interactive area for viewers to explore.
As for advertisers and content partners: “we can be that one-stop shop that allows distribution across multiple screens,” said DelaCruz. Besides, AOL will host its own content through its Huffington Post, Moviefone and Engadget brands. Single campaigns can now be deployed across multiple screens with a single media buy, he added.
The company mentioned that the extended offerings and platforms will help it appeal to advertisers, particularly as the number of internet enabled TVs increases. According to a recent study by ABI Research, more than one in five U.S. households currently have connected televisions.
“Digital advertising has really been relegated to online, as well as mobile,” said DelaCruz. “It is really a new aspect to have scale and distribution on TV sets. AOL can now reach across PCs and mobile, as well as TVs to have multiple screen distribution across one [advertising] campaign.”