Conviva Raises 6th Round Of Funding Totaling $40M, Has Raised $112M To Date
This morning Conviva announced their sixth round of funding in the amount of $40M, with money coming from a new investor, Future Fund, along with several existing investors. To date Conviva has now raised a total of $112M. Conviva has been the longest operating vendor in the market offering content owners the ability to measure the QoE of their OTT offerings with the company saying they have 200 video publishing brands and service providers including the likes of HBO, SKY, and Turner.
While the company won’t disclose any revenue numbers, the number I keep hearing whispered in the industry is that Conviva did around $70M in revenue in 2016. I have no way to verify that, but a former Conviva employee told me they wanted to do $100M+ in revenue by 2017, which to me, seems aggressive.
Conviva published their latest viewing minutes numbers across all customers citing 80% growth last year to 1 billion minutes / day and expected growth of 150% for 2018. Their customer billing model is based on viewer hours so you can extrapolate that their revenue would grow with increased viewing time. The company claims to be growing faster than the overall OTT market that is estimated to be somewhere at around 20-30% CAGR.
Conviva told me that 3-5% of the total spend on traditional TV goes to measurement and analytics and they believe the total available market will be the same for OTT. Their rationale is that the added value of continuous, census-based measurement and analytics over the internet and a wide variety of consumer video devices is inherently more valuable than more traditional panel-based statistical approaches. This market has historically been relatively small, but is now getting much more competitive, so the success of these companies will be based on the market truly experiencing accelerated growth and the recent historic drop in traditional Pay-TV subscribers is a good leading indicator of that being the case.
Conviva said they raised this round to do strategic development on their AI for video platform and the sensor network they deploy across all their publisher’s customer viewing devices. Collection and basic measurement will feel downwards price pressure with competition and market maturity, so they feel this product vision will be key to their success. In speaking with the company I learned that they have very sophisticated AI or machine learning models that have been trained for years on their large customer base of video viewing data. They stressed the large and diverse data set derived from continuous real-time measurement of all metrics and metadata associated with every second of all video viewing sessions.
This is not just QoE data, but also engagement data, audience data, content metadata, infrastructure metadata, and more. The combination of this continuous and comprehensive data collection and AI purpose-built for video could be a very interesting formula to unleash enormous value for OTT businesses.