Transpera Signs On MSNBC and The Weather Channel

The last time I spoke to Frank Barbieri was at the beginning of this summer, where I spoke with him and the CEO of ManiaTV, Peter Hoskins, and talk about their (then) new partnership.

Frank is the CEO of Transpera, a company that specializes in taking video from online and standard media outlets and customizing advertising services for content producers on the mobile platform.

Transpera at the time had a decent New Media portfolio, but has since added what can best be described as a crapload of Old Media partners, including Associated Press, CBS News, Discovery Communications, Fox Reality Channel, MTV Networks, and the Travel Channel. Add to that their New Media partners, and you’ve got a mile long list.

I spoke very briefly with Frank yesterday afternoon, and he told me that they’d been focusing almost exclusively on Old Media partners since we’d last spoken to really bulk up the volume of content they handle (and presumably because there’s very little left for them to conquer in the New Media world).

As a result of that focus, with the signing of MSNBC and The Weather Channel, he says that they’ve now partnered with every major network.

We’ll Be Exploiting Frank’s Expertise Later this Week
If you get the chance to hit play up above on the old show, you’ll see that valuable and interesting analysis comes very easy to Frank our discussion, and that’s something we hope to replicate this Wednesday when I sit down with him to talk a bit about what these new partnerships mean, and how the video startup and advertising world has shifted in the last six months.

What I mean by that is best exemplified by something I saw at NTV today in an article by Liz Gannes, where she said: “… it doesn’t seem like online content studios are going to fade out of existence anytime soon. That’s for one simple reason, and it’s not massive profit margins: they keep finding true believers to give them more money.”

Transpera isn’t a content studio, and they haven’t raised a whole lotta money lately to stay solvent (to the best of my knowledge), but the statement is indicative of a general malaise that seems to have beset all ad-supported media, and I want to get a handle on how that’s affect strategic planning and the industry as a whole from Frank on Wednesday.

If you have any questions along those lines, leave them in the comments and we’ll include them in the show.