ACTV, General Instrument to Offer Targeted Digital Television Advertising Solution

General Instrument Corp. (GI; Horsham, PA) and ACTV Inc. (New York) will work together to develop and introduce a comprehensive end-to-end solution for delivering addressable, targeted advertising via digital cable, satellite, and broadcast television. GI will combine its digital interactive system and consumer set tops with ACTV's proprietary "Individualized Advertising" software and programming capabilities, which will improve the effectiveness and accountability of television advertising.

The GI/ACTV solution will enable advertisers to target commercial advertising to specific households and individuals to achieve greater reach accountability. In addition to highly targeted delivery of advertising commercials, this solution will also offer e-commerce and interactive television advertising opportunities, such as couponing, at an efficient advertising cost per thousand (CPM).

This solution will also provide multiple system operators (MSOs), broadcasters, and other system operators with the ability to implement digital advertising insertion on a local and regional headend basis, providing incremental revenue from the same inventory of ad avails and supplemental revenue from each interactive digital commercial.

The new venture between GI and ACTV will be based on an array of system technologies designed to target advertising to individual households and persons with digital accuracy. Although these systems are designed to work in a multiple platform environment, initial deployment will be on GI's digital cable platform. Through a previously existing agreement, ACTV's software is already integrated for deployment on GI's digital interactive platform. This provides a base of more than 3.5 million digital interactive set tops already shipped.