A Remedy for Television Advertising in the Age of TiVo

by Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

In the past, television viewers had become accustomed to the burden of irrelevant advertising, but lately, technological innovation has allowed them to record television programming and fast-forward through the advertising breaks. The wide spread use of TiVo-like devices may mean the end of advertising supported television programming. In this article we describe how local-storage and processing of advertising spots can be used to target advertising-breaks for each set-top box, according to household and individual characteristics.

The traditional advertising-break consists of a number of short video sequences (commercial-spots) that have been inserted in the broadcasted stream from the transmission point. Every single household within the broadcast footprint watches the same spots, in the same sequence at the same time. Media planners acknowledge the fact that a large percentage of the viewers do not belong to their target group. Showing irrelevant advertising to people that may neither be interested in the suggested offerings, nor be of interest to the advertiser has become the norm in the broadcasting and advertising industry. However successful in financing the media industry, the traditional mass communication model of advertising is growing inadequate to provide a relevant experience to television viewers.

On the one hand television advertising is irritating to a lot of people —research has shown that as much as 30% of people zap during the advertising-break. On the other hand, Bell and Gemmell propose that advertising may be a remedy to the Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues that arise when manipulating copyrighted media content in the home: ‘Publishers will insist on DRM to protect their content and ensure their revenues. As DRM matures, cache stuffing will allow for some interesting opportunities such as insertion of advertisements that can please both viewers and distributors.’

Therefore, the dynamic insertion of advertising, during the play-out of copyrighted media content in the home, is a form of substitution for the royalty rights that have to been paid to media owners. Moreover, the advertising-break has a fixed duration, small hard-disk storage requirements and is relatively simple to integrate with real-time broadcasts. User privacy is guaranteed by exploiting user data locally at each set-top box.

Figure 1 Dynamic insertion of television advertising for each set-top box, compared to traditional mass advertising

The above justifications have been considered in the design of the iMEDIA system for personalized advertising-breaks —in-place of the traditional broadcasted advertising-break (Figure 1). The users of iMEDIA may choose to watch a personalized advertising-break, in addition to opportunities for browsing through interactive advertisement content. The system has been designed and tested with the purpose of replacing the broadcast television’s advertising-break, but can be extended to handle similar cases of dynamic advertising insertion, such as television content stored on a hard-disk or mp3 music.

A similar design for the dynamic construction of personalized television programs has been also proposed for the case of television news, although that treatment is on the technical side and does not address the usability aspect and users’ response to the application. Furthermore, while personalization is a practice used widely on the Internet by many sites that exploit the huge amount of customer information they collect, applying personalization techniques over digital television presents novel and significant design challenges, which have been identified and resolved.

You can also get more in depth information about the underlying model for personalized television and about the personalization method for television advertising.

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