Canoe Ventures, the ad tech firm owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, said it will be enabling dynamic ad insertion in households served by Frontier Communications.
The deal marks the first time Canoe has worked for a distributor other than its owners and increases the number of homes in its footprint by about 1 million to more than 38 million households.
“Working with partners like Canoe ensures that our customers receive the best possible viewing experience by having relevant content in their VOD programming,” James Frogameni, associate VP of advanced video advertising at Frontier, said.
The move comes at a time when Canoe’s business of inserting ads into video-on-demand programming has matured. Canoe has said it is looking to work with other MVPDs in the U.S. and internationally in order to grow.
Frontier, meanwhile, operates in 29 states but has struggled under the weight of debt incurred from big wireline acquisitions from AT&T and Verizon in 2014 and 201. It now has less than half of the 1.5 million video customers it had in 2016 and, to pare debt, is selling wireline assets in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana to Wave-Division Capital, headed by cable veteran Steve Weed.
With the Frontier agreement, Canoe’s roster of national programmers will begin running VOD-DAI campaigns across Frontier’s VOD-enabled subscriber base. Canoe provides service assurance, including ad map management, monitoring, resolution and analytics.
