Advanced Television
Encyclopedia
Advanced television is an umbrella term used to describe an array of features enabled by digital technology that significantly change analog television
as it has come to be known during the 20th century. The term "advanced television" was first used at the MIT Media Lab
in the early 1990s to explain why High definition television was only an early step in the foreseeable enhancements to the medium. In 1996, David Weiss
defined "advanced television" in his book, Issues in Advanced Television Technology to describe "an agglomeration
of techniques, based largely on digital signal processing
and transmission, that permits far more program material to be carried through channels than existing analog systems can manage." Today, advanced television can be characterized by four features: time shifting, addressability, interactivity and interoperability.
In his Advanced TV Advertising Forecast, Brian Wieser (Certified Financial Analyst formerly Global Forecasting for Interpublic Group's Magna) holds that Advanced TV advertising includes: "Video on Demand (VOD), requests for information
(RFIs), long-form showcases, DVR advertising, interactive program guide advertising, addressable advertising, creative versioning and advanced trafficking systems." Advanced TV advertising can also be broadened to include digital incentive requests and direct response transactions.
Advertiser demands for accountability
will require new measurements of advertising effectiveness that differ from the "exposure" measurements now so prevalent for determining media cost and efficiencies. Exposure measurements will still have a significant role to play in both pricing and efficiency analyses; but exposure will be a first level of measurement: creating the initial opportunity to generate demand. The concept of exposure will now have to be expanded from real time to include time-shifted and cross platform exposure. The second level of measurement for media pricing and efficiency will be for delivery of additional information. In some ways, this parallels the internet click through model. Here we measure and compensate the media for delivery of additional commercial content based on the requests of the audience. The third level of measurement is transactional. At this level, we measure response and compensate the media for assisting in generating the desired response:
1. opting-in for more information by media or personal delivery
2. redemption of a promotional offer
3. taking a specified action
To satisfy the marketer's need for accountability, the next generation of media measurement will be a multi-level hybrid of the disparate measurements now being used by advertising, direct response, and internet media.
Since the technology to deliver Advanced Television has been extant for over ten years, the current broadcasting business model must be inhibiting the broadscale introduction of Advanced Television. The power players on the selling side: the content developers, the cable
and broadcast network
s, and the cable, satellite and telecommunications distribution companies have stymied innovation because they are wrestling over how to divide new revenues from time shifting, addressability/targeting, and interactive applications. The power players on the buying side: the media agents who can pool the interests and experiences of their marketer clients have a "wait and see" mindset until more conclusive evidence of effectiveness can be presented. Sponsors and their agencies might break the logjam by making upfront investments in experimenting with Advanced Television and with new programming that delivers value to the audiences that marketers seek to motivate and activate.
"With the recession squeezing ad budgets, cable companies are redoubling their efforts to mimic internet advertising, in part by offering a way to target ads at selected groups of consumers. But the industry is divided on the best approach for delivering such ads." "The industry has struggled so far to establish efficient ways to buy Advanced TV on a meaningful scale. Advanced TV is challenged by the balkanized nature of the cable and satellite industry's advertising infrastructure. This produces a chicken-and-egg problem of limited media investment without better infrastructure and content, but limited infrastructure and content without more media investment," according to Brian Wieser. Industry participants are hopeful that Canoe Ventures, a consortium funded and organized by the industry's largest cable operators to aggregate inventory/infrastructure, can catalyze the sector. Canoe faces meaningful challenges in coordinating technical, sales and operational staff across thousands of varying units of infrastructure. Armed with hundreds of millions of dollars from the six largest cable operators (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Cablevision, Charter and Brighthouse), Canoe is in the process of rolling out
a scaled down version of its first ad-targeting product, called community addressable messaging. The technology will allow advertisers to select cable households within particular areas that have demographic factors, such as income, in common.
Analog television
Analog television is the analog transmission that involves the broadcasting of encoded analog audio and analog video signal: one in which the message conveyed by the broadcast signal is a function of deliberate variations in the amplitude and/or frequency of the signal...
as it has come to be known during the 20th century. The term "advanced television" was first used at the MIT Media Lab
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...
in the early 1990s to explain why High definition television was only an early step in the foreseeable enhancements to the medium. In 1996, David Weiss
David Weiss
David Weiss may refer to:* David Weiss , Swiss multi-media artist* David Weiss , author of Naked Came I* David C. Weiss, acting US Attorney for Delaware, succeeded Colm Connolly...
defined "advanced television" in his book, Issues in Advanced Television Technology to describe "an agglomeration
Agglomeration
In the study of human settlements, an urban agglomeration is an extended city or town area comprising the built-up area of a central place and any suburbs linked by continuous urban area. In France, INSEE the French Statistical Institute, translate it as "Unité urbaine" which means continuous...
of techniques, based largely on digital signal processing
Digital signal processing
Digital signal processing is concerned with the representation of discrete time signals by a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals. Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal processing...
and transmission, that permits far more program material to be carried through channels than existing analog systems can manage." Today, advanced television can be characterized by four features: time shifting, addressability, interactivity and interoperability.
- Time shifting allows the audience to control when content will be seen. DVRDigital video recorderA digital video recorder , sometimes referred to by the merchandising term personal video recorder , is a consumer electronics device or application software that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card or other local or networked mass storage device...
s (Digital Video Recorders) and VODVODVOD may stand for:*Velocity of detonation, the speed of a shock wave through a detonated explosive*Veno-occlusive disease, a complication of bone marrow transplantation*Versant Object Database, a database management system...
(Video on Demand) are the two technologies that enable time shifting of television programming. In the US at year-end 2008, 29.8 million (27% of TV households) were DVR subscribers and 41.7 million households (37% of total TV households)were VOD enabled. http://www.magnainsights.com/docs/ODQ_42009.pdf"In SingaporeSingaporeSingapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
, the upstart mioTV(an IPTVIPTVInternet Protocol television is a system through which television services are delivered using the Internet protocol suite over a packet-switched network such as the Internet, instead of being delivered through traditional terrestrial, satellite signal, and cable television formats.IPTV services...
service provided by incumbent telcoSingTel) has a robust VOD offering that includes movies, local content and more than 50 popular US programs as early as 24 hours after the programs’ US premieres. Content is supplied on a subscription basis."] - Addressability allows the advertisers to direct messages to subsets of the audience; the audience can also self select (address to self) the content and commercial messages they receive.
- InteractivityInteractivityIn the fields of information science, communication, and industrial design, there is debate over the meaning of interactivity. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels:...
empowers the audience to respond to or bypass content; the advertiser and media can benefit financially from measuring audience response. Now television commercials can enable audience response to a variety of offers using the standard remoteRemote controlA remote control is a component of an electronics device, most commonly a television set, used for operating the television device wirelessly from a short line-of-sight distance.The remote control is usually contracted to remote...
. The same response mechanisms that can be used to ask the audience for information or transactional responses can serve as the basis for consumer database marketing. And with that, it becomes natural for media advertising, relationship marketing, and promotion to converge.http://www.magnainsights.com/docs/ODQ_42009.pdfIn IndiaIndiaIndia , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, "Dish TVDish TVDish TV India Limited is an Indian company engaged in the business of providing direct-to-home satellite television service, which includes teleport service, customer support and transponder space leasing. Dishtv is a division of Zee Network Enterprise . It uses MPEG-2 digital compression...
(India’s leading satellite service) allows a viewer to access information about their bank accountBank accountA Bank account is a financial account recording the financial transactions between the customer and the bank and the resulting financial position of the customer with the bank .-Account types:...
and various banking products held at India’s largest bank."] - Interoperability means that the same program and commercial content viewed using a television receiver can cross platforms and be viewed across a multiplicity of platforms/appliances, not just the TV, but also the PCPersonal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
, the mobile handsetMobile phoneA mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
, the iPodIPodiPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
, etc. From a technical standpoint, interoperability between media platforms "requires that all the media has to adopt the same fundamental compression scheme."
In his Advanced TV Advertising Forecast, Brian Wieser (Certified Financial Analyst formerly Global Forecasting for Interpublic Group's Magna) holds that Advanced TV advertising includes: "Video on Demand (VOD), requests for information
Request for Information
A request for information is a standard business process whose purpose is to collect written information about the capabilities of various suppliers. Normally it follows a format that can be used for comparative purposes....
(RFIs), long-form showcases, DVR advertising, interactive program guide advertising, addressable advertising, creative versioning and advanced trafficking systems." Advanced TV advertising can also be broadened to include digital incentive requests and direct response transactions.
Advertiser demands for accountability
Accountability
Accountability is a concept in ethics and governance with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as responsibility, answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving...
will require new measurements of advertising effectiveness that differ from the "exposure" measurements now so prevalent for determining media cost and efficiencies. Exposure measurements will still have a significant role to play in both pricing and efficiency analyses; but exposure will be a first level of measurement: creating the initial opportunity to generate demand. The concept of exposure will now have to be expanded from real time to include time-shifted and cross platform exposure. The second level of measurement for media pricing and efficiency will be for delivery of additional information. In some ways, this parallels the internet click through model. Here we measure and compensate the media for delivery of additional commercial content based on the requests of the audience. The third level of measurement is transactional. At this level, we measure response and compensate the media for assisting in generating the desired response:
1. opting-in for more information by media or personal delivery
2. redemption of a promotional offer
3. taking a specified action
To satisfy the marketer's need for accountability, the next generation of media measurement will be a multi-level hybrid of the disparate measurements now being used by advertising, direct response, and internet media.
Since the technology to deliver Advanced Television has been extant for over ten years, the current broadcasting business model must be inhibiting the broadscale introduction of Advanced Television. The power players on the selling side: the content developers, the cable
Cable network
A cable channel is a television channel available via cable television. Such channels are usually also available via satellite television, including direct broadcast satellite providers such as DirecTV, Dish Network and BSkyB...
and broadcast network
Broadcast network
A broadcast network is an organization, such as a corporation or other voluntary association, that provides live television or recorded content, such as movies, newscasts, sports, Public affairs programming, and other television programs for broadcast over a group of radio stations or television...
s, and the cable, satellite and telecommunications distribution companies have stymied innovation because they are wrestling over how to divide new revenues from time shifting, addressability/targeting, and interactive applications. The power players on the buying side: the media agents who can pool the interests and experiences of their marketer clients have a "wait and see" mindset until more conclusive evidence of effectiveness can be presented. Sponsors and their agencies might break the logjam by making upfront investments in experimenting with Advanced Television and with new programming that delivers value to the audiences that marketers seek to motivate and activate.
"With the recession squeezing ad budgets, cable companies are redoubling their efforts to mimic internet advertising, in part by offering a way to target ads at selected groups of consumers. But the industry is divided on the best approach for delivering such ads." "The industry has struggled so far to establish efficient ways to buy Advanced TV on a meaningful scale. Advanced TV is challenged by the balkanized nature of the cable and satellite industry's advertising infrastructure. This produces a chicken-and-egg problem of limited media investment without better infrastructure and content, but limited infrastructure and content without more media investment," according to Brian Wieser. Industry participants are hopeful that Canoe Ventures, a consortium funded and organized by the industry's largest cable operators to aggregate inventory/infrastructure, can catalyze the sector. Canoe faces meaningful challenges in coordinating technical, sales and operational staff across thousands of varying units of infrastructure. Armed with hundreds of millions of dollars from the six largest cable operators (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Cablevision, Charter and Brighthouse), Canoe is in the process of rolling out
a scaled down version of its first ad-targeting product, called community addressable messaging. The technology will allow advertisers to select cable households within particular areas that have demographic factors, such as income, in common.