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With the online video industry growing at an impressive rate, it's becoming more and more important for video streaming services to differentiate themselves from one another. They are doing so by finding new ways to get their content in front of consumers, seeking out the newest, hottest offerings and creating innovative new business models that cater to viewers' individual profiles.
This is generally good news for consumers, who have a greater number of offerings to pick and choose from for their specific needs, from Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) to Hulu to Amazon Prime (Nasdaq: AMZN). In this special report, FierceOnlineVideo profiles three entrants to the online video industry that have either recently launched or started getting more mainstream attention.
HitBliss
Viewers are famously advertising averse. But would they be willing to watch a certain number of targeted commercials in exchange for "cash" which they could then spend on TV shows and movies in a service's catalog? HitBliss is banking on it.
When HitBliss co-founders Sharon Peyer and Andrew Prihodko decided to launch their second start-up together, they wanted to create an online video service that would satisfy consumers, content providers and advertisers alike. To do that, they came up with a novel approach: They would facilitate a way to let those three parties interact directly with one another.
"Consumers don't mind advertising, but they don't like ads that are irrelevant and they don't like ads that are intrusive or interrupt their experience," Peyer says. "We decided that there needed to be a way for consumers and advertisers to talk to each other independently without any relationship to the content."
As a concept, this sounds challenging to say the least. Advertisers are by nature aggressive because they have to be in order to get their products in front of consumers, and consumers are just as adamant about trying to avoid such commercials. But Peyer and Prihodko believed they could create a system beneficial to both as well as to content owners, who, as Peyer points out, also need to get paid.
[Image omitted] - (http://www.fierceonlinevideo.com/special-reports/top-3-online-video-and-comers)
HitBliss offers consumers cash to pay for TV series and movies in exchange for watching targeted ads.
To that end, they created an app called HitBliss Earn, which allows consumers to...