Content experts Limelight buy up mobile video advertisers Kiptronic

Limelight Networks today announced that it has bought Kiptronic. Limelight is a digital content publisher that follows an “any device, any time” ethos, trying to move content to an iPod as easily as it would an Xbox. It’s purchase of mobile video advertising company Kiptronic follows the launch, last month, of the Limelight mobile internet platform. Monetisation, ahoy!

These companies are pretty much a perfect match. Where Limelight wants to be able to move any content to any device, Kiptronic wants to do the same thing with video advertisements. It has a strong mobile device service, but it will also place optimised ads on computers, digital TVs, etc. The overall plan is to allow an advertiser to buy a video spot with a piece of digital content, and have the ad follow that content to whatever device it is published on.

From the release:

“Today is an exciting day for Kiptronic customers, partners, and employees. Mobile and connected devices are the next phase of growth for the Internet, and by joining together with Limelight Networks, the Kiptronic solution gains the scale and resources necessary to help the world’s largest media companies capitalize on this emerging opportunity,” said Bill Loewenthal, president and chief executive officer, Kiptronic, Inc.

“A sweeping change in consumer behavior is driving a migration of media consumption from the PC to a wider variety of Internet-connected and mobile devices,” said Limelight Networks Chairman and CEO Jeff Lunsford. “The combination of Limelight Networks’ distributed computing and delivery platform with Kiptronic’s device-targeting and dynamic ad-insertion technologies will allow us to provide the world’s largest media and entertainment companies a streamlined and scalable solution to this problem.”

What we think?

It was almost inevitable that these two companies would join together. It’s also part of the rapidly growing wave that is “digital advertising“. No one really wants to have to separate their spend into different categories - it would be much easier to combine all of them, from IPTV to mobile devices to console games, in one block. The technology to support that kind of spend has not yet been proven - “optimised” content transferred straight from on-line to mobile just isn’t smooth. But the more companies getting involved the better.