TV advertising ideas
Intro
- The tighter integration between the TV set and computers (think TIVO or card-based TV tuners) leads to an exciting set of new possibilities, that I've tried to explore.
Blue screen banners:
- Normally, TV adverts have little potential for localization, where the most localization you tend to find is regional adverts and the like. Contrast this with advertising on the web, where banner adverts are usually personalized (Doubleclick etc). Now think of what could be achieved, if TV channels broadcast the equivalent of "Blue Screens" where the ad's were to go, and the local client had the choice of what adverts should appear.
- The result: Personalized TV Commercials. Big Business opportunity.
Zap-channel-blocking:
- This is a feature I've been dying for. It goes something like this: When you're zapping, if there's a channel you're zapping past because you're not interested in the show, you'ld like to be able to block that channel in the zap list until the show has ended. To be able to do this, The TV set/Computer combo would need a reliable source of data indicating when a show is over (or what show is currently running). This could either be provided by the channel itself (think additional info like teletext), or be provided by a third party. The third party could for example be a web site using some technology to push this data to the clients.
Show category blocking:
- This one, I've been dying for as well. I would like to be able to block out categories of shows that I'm not interested in in different situations (Channel show listings on teletext, Channel zapping). Again, data for doing this could originate from either the channels themselves (fat chance :-)), or a third party.
Individual banner blocking:
- It should be possible to recognize when a certain commercial is aired, and block it instantly (probably also zapping over to another channel). The data could again be provided by a third party, or by a local pattern recognition device. To give you an idea of how a pattern recognition device could work, suppose there is a way of computing a checksum of the audio or video components (or combined) of the channel you are currently viewing, then that checksum could be compared (in realtime) with a database of checksums of known commercials. When a commercial is spotted, the personal user preferences could decide what should happen (go on looking at it, zap to next channel, blank the screen out and so forth). Boy would the advertisers be happy about this one ;-).
More stuff:
- Go up to more links.