T-commerce: The Future of TV is Today
Press to buy now!
The TV of tomorrow has arrived and it is waving banners for everything from boxed DVD sets of your favorite show to the jersey of the team that just won the football game you were watching to announce its arrival. Just sit back, scroll down to the item that catches your eye, and voila! It’s in your mailbox in five days or less. This ain’t your Grandma’s Home Shopping Network. This is Interactive Television (ITV), and its money-making potential has got media megaliths like Comcast, Time Warner and Cox Communications, among others, hot under the digital TV collar.
T-commerce, which uses icons or banners to advertise products during normal television viewing that can then be purchased by either clicking on or highlighting the item with your remote control, isn’t exactly a new concept.
Over the past decade British Sky Broadcasting, according to researcher In-Stat, has netted $325 million in annual revenue through its T-commerce ventures, with most of that coming from bets placed on sporting events. TiVo has also been at the forefront, using interactive pop-ups to engage its users. This, however, has mostly been an informative tool, offering viewers the opportunity to request brochures and such.
But Scott Dunlap, VP of Emerging Opportunities at PayPal, thinks that 2012 is the year T-commerce will really take off. “It’s been talked about a lot, but the pieces and players are beginning to fall into place more so than ever before.”
With a national ITV platform that “includes more than 20 million advanced-use digital cable households” in the US alone, a figure which a Canoe Ventures company spokesman says “represents 20 percent of the total U.S. multichannel market and 46% of all digital cable households in the nation,” and millions more cable boxes being retrofitted with the appropriate software, it looks like the industry is wising up and initiating what may the beginning of a new era in shopping.
Canoe Ventures, a consortium of cable companies, is leading the charge, pioneering software that lets channels like Bravo, USA and a dozen others take advantage of the potential $1.5 billion in revenue that In-Stat is predicting the industry will take in annually.
History Channel, a Canoe Ventures member, is already providing direct access to shopping through a simplified in-screen widget that is controlled by the users remote. Viewers can keep live feed of their favorite shows going while they browse related merchandise or, if there are no related items, History Shop best-sellers. Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO of Delivery Agent, the company responsible for building up the vast assortment of products linked to History Channel shows, says this kind of contextual commerce is the possible because of a “proprietary catalog of thousands of products tied to programming.”
So if you’re watching Pawn Stars, a show that follows antique dealers as they sift through America’s cast-offs, you might be offered a bobble-head figure of one of the shows stars, a Civil War commemorative coin, or a retro Coca-cola cooler.
eBay, the online auction house giant, is taking this technology even further by making it accessible from your favorite handheld device. It’s recently updated mobile app for the iPad, which allows you to “Watch with eBay,” is a two screen contextual commerce experience that uses the tablet to link whatever television program happens to be on at the time to related auctions on eBay’s website, thereby encouraging us all to give in to our inner impulse buyer.
“If a signed Jimi Hendrix guitar popped up for auction while I was watching his biography,” says PayPal’s Scott Dunlap, “I’m not sure if I could control myself.” Which is exactly what cable channels and the big networks are counting on.
Laura can be reached at laura.eliza.mitchell(at)gmail.com
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