Blog: Starbucks streaches product placement to the max

Friend: A good friend of mine gave me permission to publish his notes from the digital living room conference. He notes the future of technology and advertising in 6 concise points shared below:

Thought I would outline some of the salient points of the Digital Living Room conference.

1. The convergence of digital media in the living room will end up in the set-top box.

a) It will be IP based.

b) It will have multiple sources of content.

c) It will be likely controlled by a device that operates as a remote within the home environment

but becomes the portable media player, cell phone, voip phone once it leaves the house.

2. The technology for content and implementation is already shipping. The primary gating factors to the widespread adoption are Digital Rights Management. The impeding issue now, particularly in the US is that content providers are not agreeing on DRM standards. This is keeping what should be an organized deployment in chaos.

3. This climate does not exist outside the U.S. For this reason, Europe, Asia, even southeast Asia are alreadyahead of the U.S. in deployment, and will continue to surpass the U.S. in adoption of IPTV and digital entertainment convergence.

4. Advertising revenue models will be emerging to fit with these new modalities. Many iterations of “permission-based” advertising solutions were represented at the show, from “skins” that incorporate banner/hyperlink served according

to content, to discussions of imbedded advertising in videos, branded middleware layers for content delivery. Lots of discussion is occurring regarding revenue models in general, to advertising revenue in particular.

5. Content generation will undergo many changes, including a surge in Indy media and “citizen programming” as well as mining of legacy entertainment properties that were not cost-effective to distribute in analog.

6. Content Distribution will become a bit of a tug-of-war between media companies and new distribution methods like search engines. Google Video, Yahoo and others that are gearing up vital video engines will probably be the early winners in the distribution struggle for non-licensed content. Licensed content remains to be seen.

This is still being fought over and is the major reason US TV/Film is not yet on the net.