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Canoe Ventures LLC, formed in 2008 by Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Bright House Networks LLC, began with lofty ambitions.
Its initial goal was to introduce interactive, addressable and request-for-information ads onto cable systems on a national scale. But technical difficulties and strategic missteps hampered the venture. Now, Canoe is smaller and has honed in on its mission: video-on-demand dynamic ad insertion, or VOD DAI.
Currently, most commercials are baked into VOD. For example, a six-month-old episode of "The Big Bang Theory" will still be running Thanksgiving ads that first appeared in October 2012. With Canoe's VOD DAI, advertisers can switch to newer ads as often as they want. Programmers and cable networks also get to resell the ad inventory.
SNL Kagan spoke with CEO Joel Hassell to talk about the future of Canoe. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
SNL Kagan: What made Canoe change its mission?
Joel Hassell: The decision was ultimately made by the board. Once they had made the decision that they wanted to focus on dynamic ad insertion, they then notified the senior management staff of the change and [put into place] the various reorganization elements that were going to be associated with that change. That's when I kind of took over, advancing the broad DAI initiative.
What were the board's reasons for making the change?
They weren't making the progress they had hoped on the iTV front, notwithstanding some exceptional efforts on the part of Canoe and also advertisers that have signed up to try to move the ball forward. Most of the MSOs, very significantly Comcast and Time Warner Cable, had expended a lot of effort to make sure their systems were capable of supporting the [Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format] infrastructure that was being used for some of the early initiatives (request for information, voting and polling).
The bottom line is that it was kind of a difficult business model. The industry didn't fully get what they were going to do with it, even if...