With advertising income for free-to-air broadcasters dropping worldwide, is there a future for more targeted, personalised as well as on demand interactive advertising? In the UK, there is the Red Button, but so far the results have been marginal. In the US, the cable industry has now embraced EBIF (Electronic Binary Interchange Format) and the operator Comcast says the majority of the homes it serves are now interactive.
In Europe, EBIF is relatively unknown, but with the number of interactive US set-tops rapidly increasing, it is interesting to look at what is happening Stateside. What exactly is EBIF? We turn to the OCAP/EBIF Developers Network, for an explanation: EBIF is an Enhanced TV (ETV) application format that agents on legacy, resource constrained devices use to recognize that there is interactive content on the channel. EBIF defines the complete end-to-end system including how bits go on the wire, which authoring tools spit their bits out in EBIF, and which end user devices interpret or decode EBIF bits. Both content and service providers can pick whatever EBIF-spitting tools they want. Service providers additionally must select which ETV end user device software they buy.
Technically speaking, ETV has three major parts, and a growing list of related needs. First on the “major parts” list is a small chunk of software called a “user agent,” which gets downloaded into the digital box. Its job is to watch for incoming ETV triggers. When they appear (as “widgets”), the user agent runs them.
The second part of the ETV spec is signalling methods used to get the interactive triggers from their point of origination to the user agent. Generally speaking, that’s a data carousel, not unlike what sends EPG data to boxes in some systems.
The third part is a standard set of authoring tools, for developers to write ETV applications. They need to be template-based and easy to use, so that creators’ innovations can get to market quickly.
Beyond that, ETV requires things like application servers, to hold what will likely be a widening variety of interactive services, and response servers, to collect and aggregate usage data.
Then there are the inevitable reports that are needed to show an app ran when it was supposed to run and did what it was supposed to do.
In practice, it works like this: A channel uses the ETV form to create an application. The triggers for that application get inserted into the digital TV bit stream (the “MPEG-2 transport stream”), using what’s called a “stream generator.” Stream generators can be located at a content originator’s facilities, or at a cable headend.
Meanwhile, the ETV-capable box gets loaded up with the user agent, and then it sits there, waiting and listening. When a widget slips in through that digital bit stream, the user agent leaps into action to decode and display the clickable thing on somebody’s cable TV screen.
Much of the current development ETV activity is taking place at CableLabs’ “interops,” meetings where various parties come together to work on new apps. CableLabs routinely hosts interops to help work on ETV and OCAP to move forward.
How EBIF helps cable
EBIF helps cable operators deploy such services as telescoping, voting and polling. EBIF provides definitions for hardware and software that can interface with many different cable operating systems. It promises to simplify and streamline interactive television activities.
Although EBIF has been around for several years, it is now coming to the forefront as major cable operators in the US have separately decided to use this standard in order to push forward with interactive applications on a national scale.
This January, Comcast stated that it has 13 million set-tops and 8 million homes, or a third of the company’s total subscriber base, were enabled with EBIF. In August 2009, Comcast COO Steve Burke estimated that as many as 25 million homes across the United States (approximately 20% of TV households), would be enabled with EBIF by the end of 2009. Some operators are moving faster than others, and Comcast is believed to be the pacesetter.
Expectations for meaningful change in television advertising because of widespread availability of EBIF should generally be restrained, according to Interpublic’s Magna Global. While programmers will be better positioned to incorporate interactivity into some aspects of their content, it is unlikely that most of the largest advertisers will be able to scale interactive TV efforts to a sufficient degree for their day-to-day media requirements. Having said that, some advertisers might find such interactive advertising sufficient for experimental and occasional strategic purposes.
The reasons are simple: even if every home were enabled with EBIF, using this functionality once per week, usage would remain dwarfed by the volume of linear viewing. Consequently, most advertisers would be pressed to distinguish the impact of the use of such tools from “noise” even if interactivity has an intangible value that is widely appreciated. Breakout creative or strategic applications of interactive content can make this value more tangible, although such executions are likely to be rare.
Given this intangibility, if programmers deploy more interactivity in their programming, ad-supported interactive components will likely be viewed as an enhancement to conventional commercial messaging (and thus part of a bundled package from a programmer’s perspective of generating revenues). Magna Global believes that EBIF-driven advertising opportunities are thus likely to grow only to the extent that they complement economic models of ad-supported television in the years ahead.
Looking at the UK provides a useful example: the interactive “red button” has been available for many years. It was used by an average of 11 million people each week on BBC programming during 2009. But there are no meaningful advertising activities associated with the underlying technology, even though the red button technology is available to commercial broadcasters and is accessible by a majority of the population. Channel 4, the one programmer that was actively selling advertising against Red Button content, shut down its sales efforts in 2008.
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