ESPN’s ads go virtual

Posted on January 26th, 2010. Written by Emmett Jones.

Lost among the regular sports hoopla of the Super Bowl, Brett Favre’s retirement, and Lebron vs. D-Wade, was ESPN’s acquisition of the company Vistas Unlimited.  Vistas Unlimited specializes in dealing with virtual insertion of advertisements during sportscasts.  More details from MediaPost,

The acquisition of Vistas Unlimited could help ESPN financially, if it doesn’t have to license the embedded-advertising capability it already uses.

Advertisers can insert logos in baseball, college basketball and other broadcasts, but not within marquee property “Monday Night Football,” since the NFL does not allow any sponsorship integrations in games.

PVI Virtual Media Services has been a leader in the virtual insertion space — having developed the line that appears during football games showing the distance to a first down. Owned by Cablevision, it has worked with ESPN on advertising initiatives.

ESPN’s Vistas deal could give it some leverage against PVI. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. (via MediaPost)

From what I can tell, PVI and Vistas are the two largest, two of many (see the comments, thanks to commenter – Frank)  participating in this sort of virtual insertion technology.  The fact that ESPN now owns one of the companies is a huge deal considering they broadcast that much more sports programming than everyone else.  If Vistas is able to recreate or top the kind of service that PVI can currently provide, then its quite possible we could see an ESPN-Vistas monopoly on virtual ads in the future.  Think about it…The ESPN/ABC conglomerate shows the same if not more NBA and MLB games than everyone else, regardless of what the NHL tells you, they’d much rather have a deal with ESPN as opposed to Versus, the NFL wouldn’t allow virtual ads anyway…so what stops ESPN from having a virtual ad monopoly five years from now?

Practically nothing.

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