Panache Inserts Flash Ads Into Silverlight

Written by Ryan Lawler

Thursday, February 5. 2009 at 05:30 PM EST 1 comment

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Ad technology firm Panache released a new version of its ad-insertion technology into trials this week that will allow publishers to serve Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash-based ads directly into Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Silverlight video streams, Contentinople has learned.

Making Flash ads available on Silverlight could reduce a significant hurdle to getting publishers to adopt the rich media platform. That's because currently, even if a publisher wants to use Silverlight, it still has to do integration work to get Flash ads served in-stream.

"Panache's solution will help drive Silverlight adoption by lowering certain compatibility barriers. We recognize that, in the near term, some customers interested in delivering Silverlight experiences may require the use of existing non-Silverlight-based ad inventory, and we are confident that Panache's solution will serve these customers," writes Jon Rooney, senior product manager for Microsoft Silverlight marketing.

Panache CEO Steve Robinson estimates that about 90 percent of all in-stream video advertisements are created in Flash format. "Even if publishers think Silverlight is a superior video product, they still accept almost all their media buys in Flash," Robinson says.

Before the release of the new technology, publishers that wanted to serve online ad avails into Silverlight streams either had to encode advertising directly into the video before it was served, or they had to hard-code the ad units into the video player.

That's where Panache comes in. The company's technology allows publishers to easily create and edit ads in live and on-demand video streams, and supports multiple file formats and video players.

Panache has named some pretty major customers recently, including MTV Networks and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO). MTV will use Panache's ad-insertion technology across a number of its sites, including MTV.com, VH1.com, Nick.com, and CMT.com.

Yahoo, meanwhile, licensed the Panache technology to be used across multiple geographies, including the U.S., the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, Australia, and Italy.

Panache has been a Silverlight partner since October 2007, and has been working on developing technology to port Flash ads into Silverlight for some time. For now, the technology is still in the trial phase, but Robinson says the company will be ready to announce general availability after a few successful trials.