There’s a long story to tell about the quest to bring regular advertisers in your community to the television set. The regular guy doesn’t usually buy TV advertising because of its sophistication – it seems too hard and out of reach for plumbers, and painters, and the local sandwich shop. But FourthWall Media has been on a quest for years to do exactly that – bring TV advertising to small businesses providing viewers with even more opportunity to support their local communities through convenient connections.
Our quest began over twenty years ago when half of our founding members were blazing the ITV trail at SourceMedia. This was back when everything was done on the backend and delivered over analog connections. If you think it’s hard today, it was almost next to impossible then.
Almost is all they needed to hear to take on the challenge. From manufacturing set-top boxes, to installing LaserDisc players in neighborhoods, to managing thousands and thousands of business and product listings, these guys did it. And it worked. Sort of. It worked in the neighborhood, but the solution wouldn’t scale to the entire country. But what was undeniable, even back then, is that people wanted to use Yellow Pages on their TV. And our guys never forgot this.
As our current team formed and created the company formerly known as Biap – if you’re wondering whether we have a symbol for this, the answer is yes – we combined the ITV pioneers with Internet and Artificial Intelligence expertise to build a platform and suite of products specifically designed for scalability. We were still on a quest, but had to focus on laying a strong foundation before moving forward.
The result was a cool platform we called RIOT – I guess the developers were getting restless the day they named it. RIOT runs on all flavors and vintages of set-top boxes, and is an edge-based solution inspired by peer-to-peer Internet technology we had previously built. It’s small, fast, and powerful, and it ran our own application bundle for many years including apps like Personal Information TV, eBay on TV, My Football Tracker, My Baseball Tracker, NBC Olympics Now, and yes, Yellow Pages on TV…and they scaled.
While we were enjoying great success with our own apps, the industry was reflecting on how to manage different apps from different vendors across millions of homes over many, many years. Rightly so, they wanted a common way to deliver these services. We had proven it could be done and that our solution could scale, but we still needed operational scalability across MSOs, Programmers, Advertisers, and the rest of the ecosystem partners.
Since we were on a quest, we rolled up our sleeves and began building the first commercially-available EBIF platform for the industry. For those of you that don’t know, EBIF is the common specification created by CableLabs: you can think of it as the kindling that’s about to ignite and fuel enormous growth for the television business. And we were able to deliver our EBIF platform solution so quickly because of all the work we had done on RIOT, and all the attention we had paid to a resilient, scalable architecture.
Okay, to make a long story, short, we have been running our EBIF platform and a set of EBIF applications, including Yellow Pages on TV, in San Juan, Puerto Rico with OneLink Communications. And today we announced a partnership with the local yellow pages publisher, Axesa SuperPages, who has just kicked-off sales activities this week in the San Juan market for bringing long-tail advertising to TV.
Upon partnering with Axesa, we migrated 9,000 of their current advertisers over to the Yellow Pages on TV product, and provided them with a bold listing. Now, the Axesa sales force is canvassing the market with an expanded advertising offering that includes all sorts of features like click-to-call and premium microsites. Axesa has a more competitive local product, and OneLink has a brand new set of advertisers that can buy VOD showcases and more.
Aaahh, satisfaction. At last.
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