NEW YORK—A new study, timed to mark World Accessibility Day (May 21), finds that captions are now an important part of mainstream viewing—particularly among younger viewers and in the United States.

Data from a survey conducted by XR Extreme Reach and M8 Labs shows that advertisers and content providers who fail to caption their content are missing large audiences who are watching more video with captions than ever before. The survey of more than 3,000 people across the U.S., U.K., France, Spain and Germany found that captions have become a mainstream viewing behavior in every market.

But by nearly every measure, U.S. viewers are emerging as a caption-heavy audience. Eighty-seven percent of Americans say they use captions at least sometimes, while nearly half say they use them always or often when watching video.

Among U.S. audiences, 87% use captions at least sometimes, 49% use them often or always, 21% always have them on, and just 13% never have them on.

“Captions started as an important accessibility feature for audiences with hearing impairments, but they’ve evolved into something much bigger,” said Graham McKenna, chief marketing officer of XR Extreme Reach. “Captions are now part of how we watch movies, streaming series, social content, and advertising. For many of us, captions have become as important as the picture and sound, helping people follow dialogue and stay connected to the story.”

“Always or often” caption use by country:

• 49% U.S.
• 47% Spain
• 46% France
• 23% Germany (Among German caption users, 75% identify non-native language content as their single most important reason for using captions)/

XR’s research also debunks the idea that captions are mainly for older or hearing-impaired audiences. Nearly 60% of 18-to-24-year-olds say they use captions always or often, compared to just 27% of viewers over 65. Caption viewing is being driven by a generation raised on TikTok, Instagram and short-form video, where captions aren’t optional, they’re expected.

• 59%—18–to-24-year-olds / always or often use captions.
• 64%—25-to-34-year-olds / always or often use captions.
• 47% —45-to-54-year-olds / always or often use captions.
• 38%—55-to-64-year-olds / always or often use captions.
• 27%—65-plus / always or often use captions.

The top reasons people use captions cuts across all age groups and goes far beyond accessibility. Viewers say they turn on captions to better understand dialogue and accents, deal with unclear audio or noisy rooms, or simply because they like watching video that way. Surprisingly, 42% of U.S. viewers prefer to watch video with captions even when the audio is perfect.

• 44%—understand dialogue better.
• 43%—catch details they might otherwise miss.
• 36%—improve attention to the screen.
• 21%—multitask when watching.

Most viewers are using smart TVs to watch video with captions, with 86% of viewers across all markets using such sets to watch at home. Smartphones follow at 46%, with laptops at 36%, tablets at 24% and gaming consoles at 15%. Yet caption usage remains remarkably consistent across every screen and content genre.

Younger audiences aren’t just using captions more than anyone else, they’re also paying more attention to ads because of them. 61 percent of 25-34-year-olds say captions and subtitles make them more likely to pay attention to ads, the highest lift of any age group and the exact audience most brand advertisers are trying to reach.

• 45%—18–to-24-year-olds /increased attention.
• 61%—25-to-34-year-olds /increased attention.
• 20%—55–to-64-year-olds /increased attention.
• 14%—65-plus year-olds /increased attention.
• U.S. advertisers still lag with caption adoption.

“For brands, agencies, and ad creative leaders, captions are no longer something that can be treated as an afterthought,” McKenna said. “Whether it’s designing video ads for readability, accounting for on-screen text, or making sure key moments still land with captions on, marketers need to start building creative for the way audiences actually watch today.”

More information about the report is available here.

NEW YORK—XR (Extreme Reach) has announced what it is billing as a first-of-its-kind solution for paying AI-generated performers in ads.

At a time when advertisers are increasingly using AI replicas of actors or AI created characters, the payments system is designed to offer ethical, compliant AI talent payments aligned with the SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract, XR reported.

XR's platform is built to support AI performances in advertising without disrupting the underlying systems that govern celebrity and talent rights and compensation. While AI performances such as de-aging and likeness recreation have historically been reserved for big budget film and television series, their rapid adoption in advertising introduces new operational and compliance challenges.

To address those trends, XR has innovated its platform to fully support two new SAG-AFTRA performer categories, Digital Replicas and Synthetic Performers, giving brands and agencies the compliant, scalable payment infrastructure they need to move fast and stay ahead.

“AI is going to fundamentally change how celebrities and synthetic talent are portrayed in advertising, and agencies, brands, and talent agents must be ready to support this shift,” said Tim Hale, managing director, XR Pay. “The rules around Digital Replicas and Synthetic Performers are new territory for everyone in advertising and XR is here to help our brand and agency clients navigate this complexity, ensuring celebrity rights are protected, everyone gets paid correctly, and that all SAG-AFTRA obligations are met.”

For Digital Replicas, which SAG-AFTRA defines as AI-generated or AI-modified performances tied to a real performer, XR's platform will handle payments to performers or their estates under existing SAG-AFTRA structures, just as if they had appeared in the ad in-person. This covers a wide range of emerging use cases: from living celebrity actors whose performances are enhanced or remixed by AI, to iconic performers no longer with us whose estates have approved their Digital Replicas for use in advertising.

By contrast, for Synthetic Performers, AI-generated performers with no connection to a real person (living or deceased), XR ensures that equivalent compensation is directed to the SAG-AFTRA Pension and Health funds, in accordance with union requirements.

XR’s platform addresses the rapid adoption of AI in production by embedding AI performer classification and payment logic directly into existing workflows, enabling brands, agencies and production partners to scale AI usage with confidence. Additionally, XR Metadata will classify Digital Replicas and Synthetic Performers accordingly, ensuring talent rights are tracked from production to ad delivery.

New capabilities include:

Missed any of our recent product news? Here is TV Tech's weekly wrap-up of new products, services and deployments we published in our newsletter between August 5 to August 9. The stories are listed from the newest on Friday August 2, day by day back to our stories from Monday August 5. 

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Imaginario AI To Demo Video Indexing, Search, Curation At IBC 2024

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NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced that it will enhance its National television measurement in ways that will provide more granular data and allow audience estimates to be based on individual ads rather than commercial minutes. 

The enhancement to Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics will help pave the way for true comparability across the digital and linear platforms in the run-up to its launch of the Nielsen ONE cross-platform measurement solution, Nielsen said. 

Nielsen also noted that while the industry currently transacts on Nielsen's "C3" metric, based on the average of all commercial minutes in a program, Nielsen's new Individual Commercial Metrics reporting capability will enable the measurement of linear television at a "subminute" level and audience estimates at a level of granularity that is more comparable to digital. Providing this comparability paves the way for Nielsen ONE to provide true deduplication across platforms, Nielsen said. 

With more precise commercial measurement, agencies, advertisers and brands will have the unprecedented ability to directly compare, plan and optimize ad campaign performance over both digital platforms and linear TV, Nielsen added.  

To do this, Nielsen has expanded its relationship with Extreme Reach to create an efficient way to encode the vast majority of all national linear TV commercials with Nielsen's watermarks that will launch in the first half of 2022. 

"We're very pleased to collaborate with Nielsen on this important step in improving workflow efficiency for marketing teams, which has been at the core of our mission at Extreme Reach [ER] for over a decade,” said Gaurav Agarwal, chief operating officer at Extreme Reach. “As the source of creative assets for the majority of brands, including over 90 of the Ad Age 100, ER is uniquely positioned to enable measurement of those assets at greater scale. Nielsen's ongoing efforts to embrace the morphing worlds of linear and digital TV now provide a means for marketers and their agencies to understand and value digital and linear TV commercials in a directly comparable way, which is a distinct improvement for the industry," 

"Giving the industry true, trusted metrics that offer harmonization across platforms is the bedrock to revolutionizing the cross-media buying and selling process and a foundational step toward Nielsen ONE," said Kim Gilberti, senior vice president of product management, Nielsen. "By transforming our TV measurement and moving to Individual Commercial Metrics, both media buyers and sellers will be able to maximize the value of their inventory as well as capitalize and drive return on investment of their advertising spend across the rapidly converging traditional and digital landscapes."

As a first step in this plan, in early 2022 Nielsen will enhance its process for collecting and crediting watermarks, enabling the detection of watermarks more frequently within a given minute, allowing for credit of shorter duration events, such as individual ads. This change will give sellers the ability to utilize Nielsen's reporting to properly value their commercial inventory—from pricing to placement, Nielsen said. 

For the first time, Nielsen's television measurement will also leverage Gracenote Content Signatures, which will allow for granular crediting for instances where there is no watermark present. This will provide Nielsen with the capability to credit shorter durations in a more robust way across several of Nielsen's metering technologies, including Nielsen's GTAM, Nano and Portable People Meter (PPM) wearable devices.

By streamlining its crediting systems and migrating them to a cloud-based infrastructure, Nielsen will also be able to deliver to clients two streams of data: currency measurement used today and in parallel, Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics that will be fundamental for Nielsen ONE.

NEW YORK—Extreme Reach (ER) has announced that it has acquired attikSpace, a full-service media management company. The acquisition expands ER’s physical and digital asset management footprint, making it one of the largest archival media storage companies in the world, the company said. 

ER will take over attikSpace’s asset management and broadcast distribution business, as well as the company’s physical storage space in Burbank, California. Founders Mike Rizzotti and Fabian Sanchez will join the company as vice president of business development, creative asset management, and vice president of storage operations, respectively. All of AttikSpace’s employees will join ER as well. 

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“This acquisition accelerates our efforts to transform asset management for the marketing ecosystem,” said Tim Conley, CEO of Extreme Reach. “In a world where brands and agencies are producing more content than ever before, a highly specialized and integrated physical and digital asset management solution is essential. The addition of attikSpace and its deeply experienced team advances the value we bring to the global advertising industry via our creative asset management solution that enables access to physical libraries seamlessly with digital assets.”

Founded in 2010 by two former broadcast distribution executives, attikSpace provides asset storage, media delivery and production services to more than 200 brands and agencies. All of the company’s current media delivery will be immediately moved through the ER platform, providing clients with a seamless experience.

"This is the perfect next chapter for all we've built over the last 10+ years at attikSpace," said Rizzotti. "Joining forces with Extreme Reach brings expansive new benefits to our clients, especially in the areas of digital asset management and the integration of linear and digital delivery paths in one global platform."

With the acquisition of Adstream, Extreme Reach operates in 140 countries and 45 languages, with 1,100 team members serving 90 of the top 100 global advertisers and enabling $150 billion in video ad spend around the world. More than half a billion creative brand assets are managed in ER’s creative logistics platform. 

Extreme Reach’s 3Q Video Advertising Benchmarks Report said that impressions delivered in digital videos over connected TV rose 170 percent year over year. Connected TV (CTV) share of the ads served rose 38 percent, compared to 31 percent for mobile and 21 percent for desktop. Tablets, once popular, accounted for just 9 percent of impressions.

Extreme Reach found that completion rates for commercials on connected TVs rose slightly to 95 percent from a year ago.

The completion rate for connected TV ad is 27 percent higher than for desktops and 32 percent higher than with mobile.

Ads in premium content exceeded ads running with media aggregators by 32 percent. The rate in premium content was 90 percent, up 29 percent from a year ago, In aggregators, the rate was 68 percent, up 8 percent.

The report found that 30-second spots grew in popularity, with their share rising 102 percent from a year, while the prevalence of 15 percent spots was down 38 percent.

“The CTV opportunity is one that advertisers are increasingly leveraging, and the impact that’s having on ad length, while unexpected, makes complete sense,” said Mary Vestewig, senior director, video account management at Extreme Reach. “I expect we’ll see even more exciting changes driven by CTV as consumer adoption grows and technology for targeting and measurement evolve.”Based on these findings, Extreme Reach projects:

• CTV will take an increasingly large share of advertising budgets as adoption increases and targeting capabilities improve

• Brands will continue to opt to pay higher rates for the viewability and brand safety assurances that come with premium inventory.

• The number of 30-second ads will increase at a pace similar to the increase in CTV impressions

• The availability of more large-screen mobile devices will render tablets insignificant to advertisers in the near future

The report is based on metrics from Extreme Reach’s third-party video ad server.

NEEDHAM, MA— Extreme Reach is an advertising distribution and delivery company, offering a start-to-finish workflow for TV and video ads along with talent and rights management. We launched nine years ago with a focus on simplifying the delivery of ads for linear TV and now have 19 offices worldwide.

With an eye on the coming convergence of TV and video advertising, we evolved our platform to manage video ads across every screen and device with Talent & Rights compliance fully integrated—one platform and one process now gives brands and their agencies easy access to and control of advertising assets. Previously, brand advertisers and agencies had to work across many delivery formats and mechanisms, and they also had to manage the complex talent and rights that go along with those ads wherever they played. Extreme Reach brought these processes together—TV, digital video and Talent & Rights, and built a platform, unique in the industry, that supports all three.

To serve our global customers, we originally built data centers with servers in many locations and utilized cloud storage. Content creators would send advertisement files to us for ingest, then we would transcode the files to the required output formats for distribution. We use a large number of Harmonic Promedia Carbon servers for transcoding, and we worked with Telos Alliance TV Solutions Group’s team at Minnetonka Audio to create a custom variant of their AudioTools plug-in for Carbon to manage loudness. Carbon is a video-centric platform and its native loudness processing was limited in capabilities. Because Minnetonka Audio specializes in audio processing, we found that their plug-in was the most accurate solution available for loudness management and adjustments specifically designed for Carbon. So, by combining these two specialties, we compiled a best-in-breed solution for audio and video in a single package.

With our success came continued growth, and the need to build an improved, scalable solution for the future. We saw the cost of cloud services dropping, and the benefits piling up, and decided to shift our media file processing and QC completely to the cloud. We expected this move would take advantage of increased flexibility and also shift capital costs to operational costs, eliminating our ownership of the servers and their required maintenance. For the move to work, we knew we needed cloud versions of both the Carbon transcoding software and the Minnetonka AudioTools loudness control plug-in.

Telos Alliance TV Solutions Group’s engineering and sales teams worked with us to implement and upgrade our cloud-based workflow using an enhanced version of Minnetonka Audio’s loudness plug-in for Harmonic Promedia Carbon, ensuring that we could scale up as required without paying for more space than we needed. The Minnetonka AudioTools plug-in for Carbon supports audio management for television advertising as well as for all other video advertising media, including on-demand, streaming, and OTT.

With this new solution, we have already gained improved processing time, since our transcode and QC servers have direct access to our media files. This translates into faster turnaround of spots between their upload to our platform and their delivery to the thousands of destinations we serve.

We are particularly impressed that the Minnetonka AudioTools plug-in allows us to correctly normalize the loudness of spots by focusing on just the actual “spot” part of a file which will be broadcast, while eliminating from the loudness measurement any audio which may be present in the “slate” portion of the file but is never intended for air. While our spec calls for the slate to be silent, we still receive files which have audio present. Any less intelligent loudness tool, which cannot differentiate between slate and spot components of a file, will produce incorrect results.

Since implementing the new cloud plug-in solution on the transcode servers which create our mezzanine files, the number of loudness-related issues our QC and Support team typically deals with has dropped to almost zero, significantly reducing the costs and time associated with this support. Now, every spot is processed with consistently accurate loudness. We couldn’t be happier.

David Unsworth is vice president of Technical Operations for Extreme Reach. He can be reached atDavid.Unsworth@extremereach.com.

For more information, please visit Telos Alliance’s Television Solutions Group atwww.telosalliance.com/TVSGor call 216-241-7225.

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NEEDHAM, MASS.—It looks like viewers aren’t just eagerly awaiting the “skip ad” icon to appear on video ads anymore. A Q2 2017 Benchmark report from Extreme Reach reveals that there has been an increase in consumer response to video advertising, in part because advertisers are putting out better video content.

The key areas of increase in the report are in viewability, completion rates and time spent metrics. Findings showed that the average amount of time viewers spend watching video ads has increased across the board by 19 percent. Meanwhile viewabiliy has gone up 20 percent over the same period in 2016. In addition, there has been a 20 percent increase in completion rate; a 36 percent increase for premium publishers since this time last year.

Another key finding is that screen preferences are likely changing. The report found a 54 percent increase in Click-through rate of media aggregators on desktops, while premium publishers, who are running more on mobile devices and connected TVs, saw a 37 percent decrease in CTR. Mobile could have a larger impact in the future, as small video players—less than 400x300 in pixels—saw a jump in usage.

Other statistics from this Q2 2017 report showed that General Invalid Traffic is down 33 percent from last year and that there was a 17 percent drop in video in-banner ads as well.