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Google’s DoubleClick ad-serving unit, the group on which Google’s video ad hopes hinge, said it can now serve video ads on video platforms forged with Microsoft Silverlight 2.
Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash killer, is a programmable Web browser plug-in that lets users run animation, vector graphics, and audio and video media.
With the new feature in DoubleClick’s In-Stream video ad management tool, DoubleClick publisher customers such as NBC Universal Digital Media can make money from ads served with video content played within the Silverlight 2 player.
In fact, NBC Universal unit NBCOlympics.com will be one of the first sites to open Silverlight 2 content up to advertisers with DoubleClick In-Stream, providing new video ad inventory for 2,500 hours of video content.
Because In-Stream is integrated with DoubleClick’s core ad-serving platform, DART for Publishers, In-Stream provides targeting, forecasting and reporting for video advertising.
This could lead to additional opportunities for NBCOlympics.com to package video ads with display and mobile ads.
In-Stream had previously only supported video ads in Flash, RealMedia and, of course, Windows Media video systems. This is not a terrible omission. DoubleClick could have done worse than supporting the three major rich Internet application environments.
But at a time when the video ad-serving enigma has yet to be figured out and with the competitive war between Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other online ad providers far from over, supporting Silverlight 2.0 makes sense.
Indeed, supporting many video development environments is important in order to help DoubleClick’s publisher customers boost ad inventory for their online, video and mobile Web content.