The ability to watch our favorite shows on the Internet has been a blessing to many folks who don’t have the time to catch their stories at the regular time they’re on. Anyone with the Internet can watch an episode of 30 Rock at their leisure, but unlike DVR, the Internet doesn’t always offer viewers the opportunity to skip those pesky commercials. The folks at Overlay.TV have come up with a solution for this promotional problem. Instead of getting rid of advertisements altogether, The interactive media startup out of Ottawa’s alternative is to integrate them into the program, via clickable product placement and information within the video player’s real estate, which appears throughout the course of the video. The site allows for ‘internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets by overlaying contextual information directly onto online video content and linking to external websites.’ For instance, if you like a character’s backpack, you could click on it and find out where to buy it. If that’s not friendly to viewer and corporate behemoth alike then what, pray tell, is?


Paul Tuesday, 03.25.08 @ 12:09 pm

Will this concept never die?!
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DIZ/is_25_13/ai_75996105


Hessie Jones Wednesday, 03.26.08 @ 9:09 am

You’re absolutely right Paul. This concept has been talked about forever. But now it is an inevitability. The future of IPTV is around the corner. At the time the article that you reference was published, video was not even mainstay. Youtube was in its infancy and there was no reason for networks to even conceptualize, in the near term, how this could work on the TV screen. It has to evolve, like all things. Now that billions of pageviews are being consumed from video alone, the networks now have to take notice and they are. Overlay.TV realizes that in order for this to become real for the consumer, we have to try it out in a medium with which they are already familiar. We offer an alternative to current video advertising models with the user experience in mind. Give the control to the user without annoying the experience and create a win/win for both the user and the advertiser.




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