Google has acquired mDialog, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in managing, delivering and measuring targeted video advertising across an array of IP-connected platforms.
Google did not disclose the price, but in a blog post announcing the deal, said it aims to integrate the mDialog team and incorporate its technology and expertise into its DoubleClick product suite for multiscreen advertising, adding that “nothing’s changing for [mDialog’s] customers immediately. NBC Sports, Shaw Media and Fox News are among mDialog’s known historic customers.
“This represents the latest of our ongoing investments in helping brands connect with high-quality video content, like Google Partner Select, our new marketplace for premium programmatic video,” Google noted.
DoubleClick, which Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion, will be looking to push deeper into multiscreen video advertising with mDialog, and put it in better position to compete with companies such as BlackArrow, YuMe, Auditude, and FreeWheel, the online video ad firm that Comcast bought earlier this year.
mDialog’s flagship product, the Smart Stream Platform, is designed to dynamically deliver in-stream, addressable advertising on linear and on-demand programming. Supported platforms include iOS and Android, the Apple TV, the Roku platform and Xbox consoles.
Last fall, mDialog and DoubleClick announced a partnership in which mDialog integrated its ad insertion service with the DoubleClick for Publishers system, announcing at the time that the combined system would be capable of handling 1.5 million ads per break, and up to 250,000 unique concurrent streams without buffering.The companies noted that the combined solution can handle up to 1.5 million ads per ad break in terms of deciding which messages to serve and inserting them. It also can deal with a peak number of 250,000 unique concurrent streams without buffering.
Among other relatively recent activity, mDialog landed two TV Everywhere-related U.S. patents tied to dynamic ad insertion and location-aware audience targeting.
