Dear Readers:
I was watching "Lost" on ABC the other evening, and a commercial break came up. Three minutes of commercials, maybe four. But I knew that I'd return to the program right where I left off, because that's how television works. Didn't miss a thing, except a few wasted minutes of my life.
But what if the first spot in that pod was interactive? What the industry calls a "Telescoping Ad." Way cool, right? It could be a Hyundai spot, and I could click and go to a long-form VOD piece about the new Hyundai Veloster. 20 grand for loads of fun. And when I'm done I exit and go back to "Lost"--except that I've missed a few minutes of the show. And "Lost" is like European history class--drop your pencil and miss a hundred years.
And that's our problem. We're investing time and money in an advertising form that may simply be unfriendly to television viewers. It's one thing to ask the viewer to sit through 18 minutes of commercials in the average hour-long program, but it's a leap of faith to believe that viewers will tolerate MISSING parts of their favorite shows in order to experience the wonderfulness of interactive television advertising.
I've polled folks in the industry, including people on the interactive advertising side, and there is a widespread lack of understanding of the details of this kind of "telescoping." On one hand, we're resigned to the limitations of the technology, and we don't really talk about viewers missing parts of their favorite shows. On the other hand, we all rely on decades of personal television experience and basically REFUSE to believe that the show won't be there waiting for the viewer when she returns.
I actually had one ad exec say to me, "I never even thought of that."
In my (apparently endless) quest for clarification, I asked industry execs the following question: "Can you (the operator) enable an application wherein the linear channel PAUSES (on the subscriber's DVR) while the viewer goes to a VOD asset, and then RESUME the linear channel when the viewer clicks back?"
I got a lot of "ah, hmmm, yeah well, kinda sorta, maybe" answers. Net-net, the answer is "No. Not yet."
My techie friends tell me that the problem is with the series of commands needed to manage the application, the DVR and the VOD session all at the same time. We may be able to juggle two functions, but when we try to juggle three functions, we drop one.
And perhaps we just can't figure out three different operating environments that are generally handled by three different kinds of companies: server/VOD management, consumer electronics/DVR management, and interactive TV standards and applications. One operator stated, "The likelihood is low that applications running all three of those functions can communicate with each other and coordinate that series of commands in a timely fashion."
Now I tried this at home (yes, the good doctor has DISH and DirecTV and cable): DirecTV has a function on their dual-tuner DVR's, called "DoublePlay," that allows the subscriber to do the job manually. Press the DOWN arrow on any channel you're watching, and you can toggle between two channels. And if you PAUSE the first channel, you can watch the second channel without missing anything. If that second channel was DirecTV's ch. 115 (their primary advertising channel), you could even navigate around the ch. 115 interactive application. You just have to remember to click "exit" on the application to get back to ch. 115, and then to the first channel you were watching (which is still paused).
Now, admittedly, that's asking the consumer to do a lot of clicking. But if I can do the clicks manually, why can't we write software to do it automatically?
So I tried another question to my friends: When I'm watching a linear channel (in real time) through my DVR set-top box, I'm creating a buffer along the way. That allows me to pause and rewind the show I'm watching. Simple, right? So if I click on an interactive ad trigger and go to a long-form VOD session from that ad, when I exit the application, and go back to the channel I was watching, is the buffer still in place? If it is, I can simply rewind to catch the stuff I missed when I was watching the VOD session.
The answers came back mixed this time: "Nope--VOD kills the DVR buffer," "Maybe with a dual-tuner DVR," "Yeah that might work eventually," and my favorite, "That's asking the consumer to do something that we should probably do ourselves."
According to one knowledgeable source, we run into the problem that the set-top boxes view a VOD session like a channel-change (basically tuning the box to a private/virtual channel). So it won't work on a single-tuner DVR: VOD kills the buffer, as stated above.
And if you have a dual-tuner DVR, it will work unless one of the tuners is already recording an event (power DVR users tend to max out their machines, particularly during primetime), in which case you're back to a single-tuner environment. That technique might work sometimes, but "sometimes" is a bad word when you talk about the consumer experience. If it's going to work, it has to work ALL the time.
Time Warner Cable Media Sales president Joan Gillman pointed out (in The iTV Doctor: PROFILES April 9th, 2010) that TWC's "Start Over" can allow the viewer to restart the program after "going interactive." That probably works best if the interactive session is towards the beginning of the program so the viewer only has a short rewind. But it would work every time (as long as the channel is "Start Over"-enabled)
So I tried a THIRD time (starting to feel like I'm in search of the Holy Grail): "What if the cable folks could download the advertising asset (essentially a long-form video) to the DVR, and play back from the DVR. Would THAT use one of the tuners?" Answers: "No, it would not use one of the tuners. That actually might work." TiVo does it. So do the satellite guys.
So maybe there IS a solution--a classic industry "work-around." But we'll talk more about that in a future edition of "The iTV Doctor Is In!"
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The iTV Doctor is *Rick Howe*, who provides interactive television consulting services to programmers and advertisers. He is the recipient of a CTAM Tami Award for retention marketing and this year was nominated to Cable Pioneers. He is also the co-author of a patent for the use of multiscreen mosaics in EPG's. Endorsed by top cable and satellite distributors, "Dr" Howe still makes house calls, and the first visit is always free. His services include product development, distribution strategy and the development of low-cost interactive applications for rapid deployment across all platforms. Have a question for the iTV Doctor? Email him at itvdoctor@itvt.com
