iads

New York-area MSO, Cablevision, is trumpeting the results of the first set of campaigns powered by its new proprietary (i.e. not EBIF-based) interactive TV advertising service, Optimum Select. The service presents viewers with a "select button overlay" which appears at the bottom of the TV screen during a commercial and which invites them to press the "SEL" button on the remote control for more information on an advertised product. Once the viewer presses "SEL," the current program is shifted to the top-right corner of the screen to allow continued viewing, and the viewer is then presented with several possible options, including receiving a free sample of, a coupon for, or additional information on the advertised product.

Paris-based video-sharing site operator, Dailymotion, on Tuesday announced the launch of new interactive advertising formats that are designed for connected TV (OTT) and IPTV implementations of its service. The company says that the new formats--which come on the heels of its launch of an ad-supported iPhone/iPod touch application (see the article published on itvt.com, December 22nd)--expand its "ad-supported content strategy to all three screens."

New York-area MSO, Cablevision, on Wednesday announced the launch of a new interactive TV advertising service called Optimum Select.

Canoe Ventures--the company that is tasked with implementing Project Canoe, the US cable industry's initiative to create a national unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising (it is backed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House)--will later this summer publish a "template" to support an EBIF-based interactive TV advertising campaign that is slated to begin in the fourth quarter, Canoe Ventures CTO, Arthur Orduna, announced at Light Reading's Cable Next-Gen Video Strategies conference last week, according to a report by Jeff Baumgartner, editor of Light Reading's Cable Digital News.

UK satellite-TV provider, BSkyB (Sky), announced Tuesday that it is launching a green button-based "bookable" and "on-demand" advertising service that will allow viewers to easily access long-form advertising.

etc.tv--a company which offers a "telescopic advertising" service that allows hyperlinking, via overlaid visual cues, from 30-second linear commercial spots to long-form advertising content hosted on cable operators' VOD platforms (note: the service also allows advertising content to be bookmarked for later viewing, and provides what etc.tv describes as "near real-time tracking"), as well as to tcommerce opportunities, and which is currently available to around 1.9 million consumers in Quebec through a deployment on cable operator Videotron's illico digital cable service--recently announced that interactive ads it powered for Budweiser, during sports network RDS's broadcast of the Super Bowl, set "new interactive TV advertising records."

--Launches Solution Suite for Targeted and Interactive Advertising
--Forms Global Partnership with Audience-Measurement Specialist, TNS
--Teams with Tata Sky on India's First Hindi-Language EPG
--Teams with Cinea and Harmonic on VOD Solution

Interactive TV and conditional access technology provider, NDS, has generated a fair amount of news over the past few weeks: