Seven Network banking on widget TVs to generate ad revenue from online

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 01 December 2009 03:11

IT Industry - Strategy

The CASPA service launched today 1 December in Australia and a month earlier in New Zealand (Hybrid TV NZ is a partnership between Seven and Television NZ and Telecom NZ is the ISP partner).

Minicola told iTWire last week that new content was being added to CASPA rapidly and "We would expect the portal to have about 1200 hours at launch across TV music and movies...As we close deals we have to spend 24 hours a day getting that content online. It will probably not level out for at least six or eight months." She added that the CASPA portals, mytivo.com.au and mytivo.co.nz were updated in real time to reflect the addition of new content.

In Australia CASPA content is available unmetered from iiNet, Internode, iPrimus and Adam Internet. Minicola gave no indication that other ISPs would follow, but said she believed download quotas were a reducing barrier "Download quotas are going to increase naturally. For example you have people like AAPT who are doing unlimited from 8pm to 8am. My biggest worry is those people on 256k or 512k services with 500MB plans and no one is calling them [to upgrade them]."

Slow broadband might not be the only barrier to Hybrid TV's ambitions for CASPA. Even it Widget support does become ubiquitous in new TVs next year, sales in recent months have surged enormously on the back of declining prices, the advent of HD devices and the imminent shutdown of analogue TV. There is unlikely to be a major refresh of the installed base for several years, so widget support would have to be provided by an external device - with another remote control.

Minicola would not give sales figures for TiVos. She told iTWire "We don't release numbers, but we've said that our target is 500,000 TiVo unit sales in five years and we are on track for that."