Zip Television, the UK-based advertising agency that attempted to create an alternative red-button interactive advertising infrastructure to that of UK satellite TV provider, BSkyB, went into receivership January 23rd, and now has eight weeks from that date to find a buyer. If it is unable to do so, it will be dissolved.
Zip came to prominence in 2003, when it began assembling a consortium of big-name advertisers--including Procter & Gamble, Gillette, BT, Honda and Unilever--with the goal of significantly reducing the cost of interactive advertising for the consortium's members, as well as for third parties, by allowing them to avoid purchasing bandwidth from Sky. In order to do this, Zip and its partners leased satellite bandwidth for a channel on the Sky platform, which was not listed on the Sky EPG, but whose bandwidth could be used to enable red-button ads on other channels on Sky: thus viewers who pressed the red button while watching consortium members' and customers' commercials were automatically "linked" to Zip's channel, which provided the bandwidth for those commercials' interactive elements, and then linked back once they were done interacting.
For its project to be successful, Zip had to secure agreements with the UK's major commercial broadcasters to allow "linking" from linear commercials on their channels to those commercials' interactive elements on its own channel. It succeeded in securing agreements with Channel 4 (which was the first broadcaster to support its alternative interactive TV advertising infrastructure), IDS (the sales house that represents terrestrial broadcaster, Five, and the various Flextech/UKTV channels), and even BSkyB itself. However, it was never able to close a deal with the Independent Television Network (note: in the UK, the latter is generally referred to by the acronym, "ITV"), which is believed to be developing its own interactive advertising infrastructure. Its resulting inability to offer its clients the ability to run interactive advertising on ITV, which is the UK's largest commercial broadcaster, put it at a significant disadvantage in the marketplace, and appears to be the main factor in its decision to go into receivership.
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