Personalised, targeted advertising is the big black hole in the IPTV world. Everyone talks about it, and technology demonstrations are plentiful, but few claim to have seen it in action in the real, commercial world. NDS, the content security and middleware provider, used IPTV World Forum to introduce its new InfiniteTV PVR platform based on Adobe’s Flash technology. InfiniteTV allows over-the-top providers to offer internet video integrated with advertising options such as pop-up banners, or “trick mode” adverts which appear when a movie is paused, for example. Because the adverts are server-based, they are always up to date, so that recorded or stored content can be integrated with the latest advertising campaign. The service provider can monitor “retrieval” of the adverts, ie which and how many ads pop up on the screen. The NDS demonstration featured mainly short-form ads, but the company indicated that nothing prevented traditional long form, 30-second or longer video slots from being served. Ads could also appear episodically, so that an advertising message could be distributed across a series of banners, and could even be distributed to different devices. They can also be contextual, so that an advertiser might tailor a message to paused content. There are a couple of surprises about NDS’s implementation of InfiniteTV so far. First, it can only support full downloads, since the company’s emphasis is on the best quality video experience. This seems like a weakness to me, since most web TV players are at least moving to progressive downloads, and even towards fully fledged streaming. TV viewers are not known for their patience, and will expect the video to start as soon as possible after hitting the “I want this” button. Progressive download seems like a must-have for future updates of the platform. It was also surprising, given its close involvement in the interactive TV industry over the past 15 years, that NDS has not implemented interactive advertising capabilities into InfiniteTV. It would seem an obvious step to offer viewer response capabilities, and NDS confirmed that this could be possible in a future iteration of the software. Twitter: twitter.com/DavidMercer_SA Client Reading: Global Media & Entertainment Market Forecast, 2004-2012