It’s kind of like the war between spammers and anti-spammers. As soon as one side comes up with a new technological weapon, the other builds something for the arsenal to counter it. So it goes with television advertising.
Charter is starting a trial in hometown St. Louis of dynamic, on-demand advertising. The reason this is significant is because it greatly cuts down on the amount of time it takes to insert ads into VOD programming. Instead of planning weeks in advance, advertisers can deliver and update content virtually at any time.
The technology does look cool. Changes to content can be made without re-encoding and re-distributing the surrounding video, which suggests interesting applications for television outside of advertising. (Update a sitcom in re-runs with jokes that are relevant to current events. Serve up VOD news and update it with developments throughout the day…)
As far as advertising goes, we knew DVRs wouldn’t ultimately spell doom for the TV ad model. And I’ve got nothing against folks needing to make money by advertising their products. However, can we try to avoid overdoing advertisements in the new era of digital television? The amount of programming in a TV hour has significantly declined. I’d like a little more TV show with my hour of ads, please…