TV lab studies impact of interactive television

With the advent of interactive TV, the media industry is facing a paradigm shift as viewers change their viewing behavior. New questions arise, such as what happens when the majority of viewers shift the time of their viewing and prime time no longer exists? How can advertisers make their messages more effective when viewers can fast-forward through ads? Three media companies joined forces to create an in-home TV lab to answer these and other questions.

ASI Entertainment, a televisual research company; Nielsen Media Research, the television ratings company; and TiVo, providers of personal television services, combined their talents to understand the impact of emerging television technologies on programming and advertising. Nielsen Media Research designed and recruited a panel of 1,500 representative U.S. households. TiVo provided personal television services to the selected households. ASI Entertainment is managing the two-year lab and will conduct and report research findings.

Currently, the lab is in the beta test, according to Donna Taylor, spokesperson for ASI Entertainment. The lab will be fully underway in the first quarter of 2001.

Consortium Consultations
Research topics to be studied through the lab are being determined by the lab's consortium of 18 executives from advertising and media companies. Consortium members, recruited by Nielsen Media Research, also will have the opportunity to organize their own panels to test anything they wish during the two-year lab.

Consortium members could study such things as program flow, in which their panelists would be fed a different program lineup than the primary panelists to test various lineup plans. In addition, they could feed alternate versions of commercials and ask their panelists to determine which they prefer. Consortium members could test a different commercial placement, such as shorter and more frequent advertising pods, to determine which placement is most effective with personal TV.

"Our consortium members will empower themselves to develop new standards by actively guiding the direction of the TV lab," said Paul Lenburg, ASI Entertainment's executive vice president. "The emerging knowledge will create programming and advertising that will capture viewers' attention, keep them watching, assist them in retaining information and make them take action."

Getting a Handle on ITV
The goal in organizing the consortium is to get some of the brightest minds from forward-thinking companies who will benefit from the findings of the TV lab, according to Susan Austin, spokesperson for TiVo. These executives have responsibility for building strategic plans for their companies.

Jim Spaeth, president of the Advertising Research Foundation, predicts the TV lab will be an effective research tool that will reveal interactive television's bright future. "I believe the TV lab touches on the precise issues that will reshape television," Spaeth said. "There have been a litany of brave but failed attempts with new technology, but this time it seems different. Technology, economy, consumer lifestyles and workstyles, and the conditioning of the general public to the Internet all promise to make this the time it really happens."

Swirbul serves as a technical writer for a variety of industries. She also writes content for business-to business and business-to-consumer Web sites. She can be reached at cswirbul@unicom.net (Back to top)