Channeling’ on the net
Anyone with a broadband Internet connection can already watch television shows or listen to the radio on a personal computer, sometimes without the intrusion of advertising. Now some marketers, worried about a world in which they can no longer rely on TV commercials to get their messages across, are taking matters into their own hands, starting their own ‘channels’ on the internet. Land Rover, the brand of British sport utility vehicles owned by Ford Motor, this month introduced what it billed as the first broadband television channel run by a car company. It features an around-the-clock schedule of packaged multimedia programming, interspersed with ads for the Land Rover brand, accessible via a special website. That move followed news from Bacardi, the rum maker, that it planned to start an online radio station, available over the internet and mobile phones. The service will stream ‘uplifting party anthems from the world’s hottest dance floors’ to listeners around the globe. The Land Rover and Bacardi projects are some of the first to put advertiser- financed content on the internet, in the scheduled framework of a ‘channel,’ rather than simply making material available on demand. The internet also makes it possible to create such a channel at a small fraction of the cost of a conventional TV channel distributed via cable or satellite. It is also easy to provide global availability, which would be hard otherwise, given the difficulty of allocating actual television channels for such purposes. The problem, as with much advertiser-sponsored programming, may be the content itself. Are advertisers deluding themselves in thinking that anyone will actually tune in to Go Beyond, or to Bacardi’s B-Live Radio? (International Herald Tribune,April 24, 2006)
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