Philips Develops Technology to force TV ad viewing
Writing for Business Week, May Wong -Technology writer for Associated Press- tells us that Philips is applying for a patent for a technology that can allow broadcasters to freeze a channel during commercials. This would make it impossible for the viewers to avoid it.
Company officials were quoted in the article as saying it was never their intention to force viewers to watch advertisements and the technology can be used to perform the opposite function -removing all the advertisements from a particular program.
Here is where this gets very interesting. You can see how the major companies are feeling their way into tomorrow's market. If we TiVo out all television ads, watch prime time programs whenever we feel like it and receive content on a multitide of different portable devices then their current business model is looking more than shakey.
Philips is obviously betting that in the next few years we will have the option to pay a premium and receive our programs free of advertisements or alternatively get forced into watching them. Be deeply suspicious of this technology as it leaves it up to the broadcaster whether they use the technology to cut out the ads or force them into your living room -and honestly, which one do you think they'll end up choosing?
The plus-side to this development is that we are one step closer to precision demographic advertising. Considering the sole purpose of this technology is to get advertisements to viewers in a climate where the notion of prime-time no longer exists, If I am going to be forced to view these advertisements in whichever VOD program I have had downloaded then they might as well target those advertisements specifically to me: young, male, iPod owner, living in New Zealand. It is simply a matter of capturing this information when I subscribe or download.
One of the problems for television in the coming days is that print has a wider array of technologies available right now to move from mass-marketing to niche-marketing, to make the jump from wide-appeal to the mixture of demographic and geographic marketing that will ultimately prove the most effective. This new technology from Philips will hopefully be a step in the right direction for TV, assuming they take my advice in the above paragraph.
Or at least it will be a step in the right direction if you don't own a Philips TV. The company has no plans to use the technology in any of its products. What did I say about being suspicious?
Company officials were quoted in the article as saying it was never their intention to force viewers to watch advertisements and the technology can be used to perform the opposite function -removing all the advertisements from a particular program.
Here is where this gets very interesting. You can see how the major companies are feeling their way into tomorrow's market. If we TiVo out all television ads, watch prime time programs whenever we feel like it and receive content on a multitide of different portable devices then their current business model is looking more than shakey.
Philips is obviously betting that in the next few years we will have the option to pay a premium and receive our programs free of advertisements or alternatively get forced into watching them. Be deeply suspicious of this technology as it leaves it up to the broadcaster whether they use the technology to cut out the ads or force them into your living room -and honestly, which one do you think they'll end up choosing?
The plus-side to this development is that we are one step closer to precision demographic advertising. Considering the sole purpose of this technology is to get advertisements to viewers in a climate where the notion of prime-time no longer exists, If I am going to be forced to view these advertisements in whichever VOD program I have had downloaded then they might as well target those advertisements specifically to me: young, male, iPod owner, living in New Zealand. It is simply a matter of capturing this information when I subscribe or download.
One of the problems for television in the coming days is that print has a wider array of technologies available right now to move from mass-marketing to niche-marketing, to make the jump from wide-appeal to the mixture of demographic and geographic marketing that will ultimately prove the most effective. This new technology from Philips will hopefully be a step in the right direction for TV, assuming they take my advice in the above paragraph.
Or at least it will be a step in the right direction if you don't own a Philips TV. The company has no plans to use the technology in any of its products. What did I say about being suspicious?
posted by Gordon White at 9:43 am
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