In a move that signals bigger video-facing ambitions, Spotify this week announced it has acquired MightyTV, a startup that has developed a content recommendation system.
As a result, Brian Adams, founder and CEO of MightyTV, is joining Spotify as VP of technology, where he’ll focus on advertising and marketing technology platforms. Spotify reasoned that Adams’s expertise in programmatic advertising and personalized recommendations will help Spotify further develop its own ad products and its marketing technology platform.
“The content recommendation system MightyTV has built is incredibly aligned with how we think about advertising technology and marketing personalization,” Jason Richman, VP of product at Spotify, said in a statement. “Brian and his team will help us continue to innovate on free monetization and extend our leadership position in programmatic audio.”
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Spotify launched programmatic audio advertising on a global basis last year, with partners such as AppNexus, Rubicon Project and The Trade Desk, that lets advertisers target audiences by age, gender, genres and playlists.
Adams also founded Admeld, a publisher monetization platform that was created in 2007 and sold to Google in 2011. He ran the DoubleClick Publisher Platform at Google before starting up MightyTV in 2015.
Spotify said the MightyTV team will be based in Spotify’s New York City, Toronto and Stockholm offices.
After the deal was announced, MightyTV noted on its web site that its app will no longer be updated or available, but that the company is “excited about the road ahead.”
Spotify didn’t disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. MightyTV had raised over $4 million, according to CrunchBase.
Though Spotify’s business centers on subscription and free, ad-based music services, the company should be viewed through the lens of a “platform” that can support multiple media types, according to BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield.
“Platforms have direct relationships with consumers, put the consumer first as they built their businesses and continuously utilize robust amounts of data to improve/adjust their strategy,” Greenfield wrote in a recent blog post (registration required) about why Spotify should make for an attractive acquisition target for media companies. “Stop thinking about Spotify as a music service and start thinking about it as a media platform that simply started with music, but has the potential to be so much more.”
Spotify started to delve deeper into the video world in 2015 when it announced an expansion into video, initially by offering clips and other short-form video from partners such as ESPN, ABC, NBC and Turner.
