Targeted Advertising Coming To Cable TV 171
The New York Times reports that Cablevision Systems is testing a new project in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and some areas of New Jersey to bring targeted advertising to television audiences. "The technology requires no hardware or installation in a subscriber's home, so viewers may not realize they are seeing ads different from a neighbor's. But during the same show, a 50-something male may see an ad for, say, high-end speakers from Best Buy, while his neighbors with children may see one for a Best Buy video game." The test deployment includes 500,000 households, and separates viewers by demographic data from Experian. "Experian has data on individuals that it collects through public records, registries and other sources. It matches the name and address of the subscriber to what it knows about them, and assigns demographic characteristics to households. (The match is a blind one: advertisers do not know what name and address they are advertising to, Cablevision executives said.)"
Re:Don't use their boxes (Score:3, Informative)
This is only on digital. And they surely aren't sending a different ad to each subscriber. In all likelihood they're transmitting two to four ads per service.
Digital cable video bitrates are highly variable. There is no technical impediment to sending out multiple A/V streams on the same service at the same time without increasing the total bandwidth used by the service. Of course, video quality will suffer, but a significant portion of ads are "talking heads" anyway.
Furthermore, it would be quite possible to monitor bandwidth at the QAM level, and "steal" some bandwidth from other services on the QAM in order to provide more consistent quality during targeted ad breaks.
The really interesting thing here is that previous systems (that I'm aware of, anyway) have used a software client on the set top to select the ad. This scales. If they're doing this in the headend I don't see how they're going to scale to a significant number of channels with a useful number of demographic groups. Maybe this is only on DSG boxes?
-Peter
Lesbian Orange Juice Commercials FTW! (Score:1, Informative)
I just want to know how to get targeted by Lesbian Orange Juice Commercials and nothing else!
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/898236/the_lesbian_orange_juice_commercial/
Long Term Progression... (Score:3, Informative)
1. Free TV with commercials
2. Promise of pay TV without commercials
3. Pay TV with commercials
4. Pay TV with commercials and shopping channels
5. Pay TV with targeted commercials and shopping channels
6. Pay TV where they remove your eyes and jab probes directly into your brain so they can harvest your inner most thoughts for a profit