BlackArrow, An Internet and TV Advertising Company, Has Raised $14.75 Million in VC Funding

By Amit Chowdhry • Nov 9, 2006

Intel Capital, Mayfield, Comcast, and Polaris Venture Partners has provided BlackArrow $14.75 million in venture capital to promote the development of BlackArrow’s advertising technology ideas.

The idea behind BlackArrow is to provide advertisements on the Internet and on television.

And the difference between BlackArrow’s insertion of advertisements into TV compared to other TV advertisement companies providing the same service is that BlackArrow will prevent TV watchers from skipping the advertisements even though the TV watches may have a fast-forward button on their digital video recorders (DVRs).

An example that VentureBeat provided about the BlackArrow service is that if someone attempts to forward a TV show playing on ABC, “The 30-second TV spots are removed and replaced with a group of pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll ads, as well as companion ads” are displaying in these playback modes. I assume that they would be still images since it would be difficult to implement uninterrupted video advertisements on these playback modes, but you never know what is going on behind the scenes at BlackArrow.

BlackArrow is based in San Mateo, CA. BlackArrow’s origins date began in 2002. Tom Morgan and Pat Dunbar founded the Digital Media and Advertising (DiMA) Group. Through these investments in the Group, various lead programmers and advertising experts came together to solve problems in the on-demand TV market. BlackArrow was the result. Denny Wilkinson is the President and CEO of BlackArrow.