21/04/06: Back to the future
"The most meaningful interactions will happen on whatever screen connects you to the internet at any particular moment.", Tom Collins, The Great Marketing Turnaround, 1992
Foresight is a wonderful thing.
Foresight is a wonderful thing.
15/02/06: The Digital Home
PVR, HTPC, IPTV? Geeky gobbledy-gook or household acronyms in 2 years? Like it or not the Digital Home Network is coming. I don’t know how fast - but its coming. Call it the digital living room, the connected home, the IP Castle - all we know is that connecting your TV, HiFi and PC to broadband for a new generation of communications services will happen.
With broadband penetration and UK home PC ownership both soaring and media owners eying new revenue streams it's a given that we will be logging onto to our Home Networks through our TV's in the near future.
The implications for brands are staggering.
Consumers will be empowered to create their own entertainment schedule each evening - many may have their schedules created for them by intelligent software that has learned their viewing and listening habits.
PVR's or Personal Video Recorders offer the ability to time shift - essentially watch TV at a time other than the scheduled terrestrial or satellite broadcast, But this doesn’t mean the next day - it could be 5 minutes after the show has started - about the length of an ad break. And this means that the consumer has recorded the ads before they have seen them so they have the power to simply fast-forward them using their remote control. Consumers with advanced PVR's or Home Theatre PC's (HTPC) will detect ad breaks and skip them automatically.
Scary, eh?
Technology is giving the consumer more and more control. And the consumer electronics giants have to show something brand spanking new at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas every year and I’ll bet it will be something that will incrementally give the consumer more control over all of their digital media.
Personal media and commercial media will fuse. Photos of babies and holiday snaps will cohabit the same screen as an episode of commercial free Coronation Street. And it will be everywhere - in more than one room in the house. On mobile phones. On PC's. On TV. Google are already laying the foundations for this revolution with the launch of VideoStore which allows you to find broadcast media using Google technology and Yahoo have launched their Go! Service which serves up all of a user's Yahoo content no matter what device a consumer is using as long as it is connected to the Internet
How do brands prepare for this change? What tools and techniques do they need to be able to leverage this opportunity? The techniques and tools already exist - stepping out of the comfort zone of ad-ratings supported rich media, Search Engine keywords and into domain of e-fluentials is the real challange.
With broadband penetration and UK home PC ownership both soaring and media owners eying new revenue streams it's a given that we will be logging onto to our Home Networks through our TV's in the near future.
The implications for brands are staggering.
Consumers will be empowered to create their own entertainment schedule each evening - many may have their schedules created for them by intelligent software that has learned their viewing and listening habits.
PVR's or Personal Video Recorders offer the ability to time shift - essentially watch TV at a time other than the scheduled terrestrial or satellite broadcast, But this doesn’t mean the next day - it could be 5 minutes after the show has started - about the length of an ad break. And this means that the consumer has recorded the ads before they have seen them so they have the power to simply fast-forward them using their remote control. Consumers with advanced PVR's or Home Theatre PC's (HTPC) will detect ad breaks and skip them automatically.
Scary, eh?
Technology is giving the consumer more and more control. And the consumer electronics giants have to show something brand spanking new at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas every year and I’ll bet it will be something that will incrementally give the consumer more control over all of their digital media.
Personal media and commercial media will fuse. Photos of babies and holiday snaps will cohabit the same screen as an episode of commercial free Coronation Street. And it will be everywhere - in more than one room in the house. On mobile phones. On PC's. On TV. Google are already laying the foundations for this revolution with the launch of VideoStore which allows you to find broadcast media using Google technology and Yahoo have launched their Go! Service which serves up all of a user's Yahoo content no matter what device a consumer is using as long as it is connected to the Internet
How do brands prepare for this change? What tools and techniques do they need to be able to leverage this opportunity? The techniques and tools already exist - stepping out of the comfort zone of ad-ratings supported rich media, Search Engine keywords and into domain of e-fluentials is the real challange.
