Rovi Expands Offerings with Click-to-Shop Deal With Delivery Agent
By: Donna Howell
Couch potatoes will be able to click their remotes to buy T-shirts, DVDs and other items from TV networks’ stores as a result of a deal between TV listings guide developer Rovi (ROVI) and Delivery Agent, a venture-backed company that runs e-commerce store operations for almost three dozen TV networks.
NBC Universal and A&E Television Networks will be first to do this with ads for key shows, right on the program guide, says Delivery Agent CEO Mike Fitzsimmons.
The deal, announced Tuesday just hours before Rovi releases Q4 results, amounts to one more step for the company’s ambitions to develop broad advertising and e-commerce revenue potential around TV listings. The company makes on-screen program guides used by cable and satellite service providers and connected-device manufacturers, and owns a lot of intellectual property around program guides themselves. So those parties pay Rovi whether or not they use its guides, and have an incentive to use Rovi’s.
The click-to-buy capabilities will show up within 90 days for users of on-screen program guides made by Rovi, on Internet-enabled TVs made by partners such as Samsung. Similar options are planned for consumers who view their program guides on the Web. Viewers who see the guides via their cable or satellite provider will get ads that suggest they check out the network’s store on the Web — since they can’t get there directly from a TV. Yet.
The click-to-shop innovation “opens up a new revenue stream for us in e-commerce and helps to drive advertising,” said Jeff Siegel, senior vice president of global media sales at Rovi. When networks “want to sell products, they’ll buy advertising” that leads to their store portals. He says Delivery Agent was a great match because they’re so connected with the networks.
Delivery Agent is a private company based in San Francisco, with backing from several venture investors since 2005. Bessemer Venture Partners is the largest. Others are Worldview Technology Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, T-Venture, Focus Ventures, Ironwood Capital and Coral Group. Delivery Agent’s client list includes 35 networks — a few among them: CBS, HBO and Showtime, Fox, Discovery, Lifetime, Univision and USA.
Fitzsimmons says the shopping platform Delivery Agent uses is very data-driven, and can map available products to Rovi’s wealth of metadata around shows and content to, for instance, “associate an episode of ‘The Office‘ to all the products relevant to that.” He says the key is the ability to contextually promote products relevant to whatever a consumer is viewing or searching for at the moment.
Siegel suggests a hypothetical moment: “At 8 p.m. you can be searching for something on ‘True Blood’ (the HBO series) and we can sync up a banner ad at the bottom so you can go buy the DVD series or a T-shirt.”
Rovi, which may be just a few days away from finishing its acquisition of program-delivery technology company Sonic Solutions (SNIC), reports Q4 financial results after Tuesday’s market close.








