About a month ago, Home Shopping Network announced a joint venture with GoldPocket Media to develop a “click & buy” interactive TV application, allowing customers to purchase items being shown on the network via their TV remote control. The company’s press release calls this new technology an “unprecedented blend of interactive television and TV shopping” and a “groundbreaking initiative”, all of which would be true if their biggest competitor (starts with ‘Q’, ends with ‘VC’) had not already launched this functionality last summer with iTV provider OpenTV and Charter Cable.

Regardless, this new functionality may finally take interactive TV out of the theoretical and into the real for the first time. For a while, many industry insiders have speculated as to the implementations of interactive TV, with the click and buy functionality at the top of the list. Fox already lists the songs played during each week’s episode of “The O.C.” before the credits — imagine if viewers could buy them through their remote controls without even leaving the couch? Once that’s in place, the product possibilities are endless — at the very least I’d expect to see every piece of clothing that Marissa and Summer wore during that same episode up for sale.

These ideas have been around for a while, but the progress of iTV has really stalled in this country, most likely because cable companies have focused on other enhancements like digital programming and onDemand movies instead of iTV buying capabilities. However, as I mentioned earlier, with Verizon and SBC entering the market, added competition could encourage all the players to ramp up their schedule for further interactivity.

It makes complete sense for the TV shopping channels to act as guinea pigs for this functionality, as they would most likely not feel the backlash that in-your-face product placement may initially have on network TV. People watching these channels are at least somewhat interested in shopping for products, and will be far more likely to adopt a remote control click-to-buy process early on.

These new product placement possibilites do come along at a perfect time to offset the loss of commercial viewership due to DVRs and TiVo. Now that Comcast offers a usable DVR for just $9.95 a month with no setup fee, more and more people are learning how to fast forward through commercials every day. Savvy content producers will ignore the urge to squelch progress and will get the message customers are sending: we don’t like watching commercials. Customers do, however, like to watch actual TV shows. Product placement within shows kills two birds — it keeps advertisers happy and ad revenues high while reaching receptive viewers in a timely, efficient manner.

Clearly commercials are not going away any time soon, but it seems to me that the Truman Show was prophetic: it’s much easier to reach a teenage girl through her favorite character on The O.C. than through some commercial that she’s probably not going to be watching even if she doesn’t have access to a DVR. Allowing her to buy the item instantly will only make it that much easier.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 6:31 pm and is filed under interactive TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.