Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Shuttered Ad Tech Startup Team Lands at Intel’s Web TV Project

erik_huggers2Earlier this year, we told you that advertising exchange AdBrite was shutting down and selling itself in pieces.

Now we know where one of the pieces has gone: Intel’s TV-over-the-Web project. Intel Media has picked up five members of AdBrite’s core engineering team, according to a person familiar with the move.

In what was essentially an “acqhire,” Intel grabbed AdBrite’s CTO, along with four other former employees; I’m told they will work on data and analytics projects, which will include everything from ad systems to content recommendations.

Intel Media is a small but very ambitious project from the chipmaker, which is trying to do something that tech/media heavyweights like Google and Apple have yet to attempt. Intel Media head Erik Huggers says he plans to start selling pay TV, delivered over the Internet, sometime later this year, in conjunction with an Intel-built set-top box.

In order to do that, Intel has to clear a lot of hurdles, including getting programming deals with all or most of the big TV networks. So far we haven’t heard any of them say that they’re on board, but Intel keeps insisting that it is making progress.

Here’s a highlight reel of Huggers’ interview with Walt Mossberg and myself at D: Dive Into Media earlier this year, where he first outlined his ambitions in public:

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald