It's Not Your Father's TV, Part 2

Getting onto the TV also has a tendency to elevate the reputation of whatever content makes it onto that screen. "I think that it’s absolutely critical to advertisers and very beneficial to our other broadband partners to see us have that reach up into the TV platform," says ExpoTV president Bill Hildebolt. "It’s actually even important to our consumers who are building communities on our site. It’s attractive to them because there’s that credibility that’s been built into that distribution platform."

Kwon sums up this sentiment nicely: "You don’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, you’re not just a TV network.’ Whereas now we’re ‘not just an internet site’ because we’re able to get to the TV set through these IP platforms."

Beyond the bump in status internet ad inventory gets, making it to the TV also opens up new opportunities to expand and enhance that messaging. "TV is just a much larger screen, so you can use much larger branding elements, like a station ID overlay," says Hudack. "We’ve started doing that on the web in the video player and it works, but it doesn’t really capture your attention the way it does on the TV. For example, you can’t have as much motion in it. So I think you can get a little more aggressive in advertising on TV than on a computer and do so in a way that doesn’t alienate your audience as it does on the computer."

And advertisers are recognizing the value of getting their messages onto the TV via IP. "From a monetization standpoint, there’s a voracious appetite for emerging marketing opportunities," says Joe Gillespie, executive VP of CNET, which has CNET TV available as a channel on TiVoCast. "We’re not having a problem selling our video-on-demand or TiVo inventory. We’re not doing that necessarily on a straight CPM basis as a lot of it’s flat-fee sponsorships, but it’s new revenue nonetheless."

Still, the young marketplace is still holding these distribution channels back from being major profit engines. "We’re very pleased with the usage, but we’re not necessarily seeing it translate into significant revenue simply because of the limited size of the subscriber base," says Kwon about Expo TV’s presence on Akimbo, and in turn AT&T HomeZone.

"We’re still in the experimental stages. What revenue does come from it today is a wonderful thing. And I think in a year and a half I’ll have an extraordinarily different answer," says Hudack. "I think we’re still at the stage of the market where everybody is thrilled every time a new opportunity to get onto the TV set is presented, but there isn’t yet that driving force behind it."

An Undeniable Future
Until that driving force manifests itself and begins driving mass-market consumer adoption of IP-to-TV technology, this space will continue to be more experimental playground than exciting new revenue stream.

But with the number of players vying to discover the technology and business model needed to make IP-to-TV a mainstream reality steadily on the rise, the sense is that the maturation of this marketplace is a question more of when rather than if.

"Knowing there’s this huge audience for the wealth of content on the internet and a huge audience for the TV, it only stands to reason that there’ll be a huge audience for the merger of the two," says Hudack.

Whether it’s discovering content on the PC and pushing it to a TV, navigating online libraries through an internet-enabled box in the living room, or leveraging next-gen TVs’ ability to connect directly to the internet, at some point the pieces will all come into place in a way that finally creates a compelling enough value proposition that users will flock to it in the kinds of numbers that can support IP-to-TV for the long haul.