Celebrating 25 Years of WideOrbit: A Journey of Innovation and Transformation

WideOrbit is celebrating a milestone anniversary in 2024 - 25 years of revolutionizing the media advertising industry. Founded in 1999 with the visionary goal of simplifying the buying and selling of advertising, WideOrbit has come a long way, continually adapting to the changing landscape of media and technology.

The Early Days Our journey began with a humble yet ambitious start. Our first installation was in late February 2001, at WENY-ABC-TV in Elmira, NY, where we launched a basic traffic system. That system would eventually evolve into WO Traffic. By early 2002, we were operational in over a dozen stations and had contracts with upwards of 35 more. The spring of 2003 marked significant growth as we went live with the New York Times stations, Meredith stations, and secured a contract with Liberty Corp to install our systems at their stations.

In 2009, WideOrbit acquired Google Radio Automation, which became WO Automation for Radio and is now North America's leading enterprise-grade radio automation system. In 2012, we introduced WO Network, a product that transformed network trafficking and commercial operations. Built by industry users for users, WO Network was a game changer for cable and broadcast networks.

Today, over 6000 radio and TV stations and networks run on WideOrbit solutions.

From the very beginning, we anticipated the future of video delivery over IP (Internet Protocol) and the growing importance of digital. We remained committed to bridging the technology gap for linear TV and radio, recognizing the value our products were providing to broadcasters, while simultaneously building towards an increasingly converged media landscape.

The Evolving Industry The media industry has dramatically shifted over the past 25 years. The transition of audiences from linear to digital platforms and the proliferation of audience measurement tools have altered market conditions. This shift has presented challenges for our clients, including declining linear revenue. But there's also the fact that digital vs. linear revenue is not dollar-for-dollar, and monetization has not kept up with measurement. These changes underscore the unsustainability of traditional sales paradigms in the face of increasing business costs and siloed revenue streams and operations, all of which negatively impact both efficiency and profitability.

WideOrbit's Response: A Converged Solution WideOrbit is taking a three-pronged approach to address the evolving needs of our clients, creating a truly converged solution for modern media sales and operations.

Unify - Move strategic work upstream and streamline access to demand

Automate - Automate operations

Transform - Utilize emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Large Language Model (LLM) technology to disrupt the current industry paradigm

Unify WO Fusion: A cloud-based, browser-enabled solution that facilitates cross-media, multi-property ad sales and stewardship. WO Fusion makes it easy to price, plan, and sell any media type, leveraging AI and ML-assisted planning and data analysis. Multiple audience measurement data sources provide a unified view of converged audience engagement.

WO Digital Hub: Our consolidated digital order management platform unifies digital ad sales, operations, and finance. WO Digital Hub offers robust integrations with pre-sales and CRM systems, rate card builders, and audience measurement providers, plus digital campaign execution by connecting with ad servers such as Google Ad Manager, FreeWheel, and AdsWizz. Customizable dashboards provide comprehensive performance and revenue reporting across your entire digital landscape.

WO Fusion with WO Digital Hub: Bundle the two solutions together to enable converged selling that allows for split-and-send order management, multi-platform reporting and stewardship, first-party and third-party impression reconciliation, and converged billing via WO Digital Hub, WO Network, WO Traffic, and WO Omni.

Automate WideOrbit.io: Provides an API gateway and event architecture to connect systems and streamline your business. Built on top of WideOrbit systems, including WO Traffic, WO Network, and WO Omni, so the data integrity and performance of these platforms are protected. WideOrbit APIs provide seamless, real-time interaction with your applications at the object level. Designed for flexibility and adaptability, WideOrbit APIs enable you to connect and interact with your data effortlessly, boosting operational efficiency.

WO Data Bridge: Revolutionizing large dataset management, WO Data Bridge offers a gateway to advanced business intelligence and analytics. It provides access to raw and curated data, refreshed multiple times per day or on a custom schedule. And as a serverless, cloud-based solution, no hardware investment is required.

WO Automation for Radio: WO Automation for Radio provides centralized, scalable radio automation that makes it easy to program and optimize content, streamline workflows, and reduce costs. Allows your Broadcast Engineers, Program Directors, and on-air talent to manage station operations remotely.

Transform WO Q: AI-powered converged planning and stewardship for media companies across verticals. WO Q brings AI to WideOrbit software with a chat-based interface that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on language specific to the media industry. Building context through user prompts combined with previous campaign data (Retrieval Augmented Generation), WO Q leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to automatically create optimized advertising proposals.

WideOrbit Professional Services: The depth and breadth of WideOrbit media experience is unparalleled in the industry. In addition to the significant benefits our products bring to our global customer base, our Professional Services organization has gained

LINK:	https://www.wideorbit.com/blog/wideorbits-anniversary-25-years/...
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