MiSPOT: dynamic product placement for digital TV through MPEG-4 processing and semantic reasoning

摘要

In an increasingly competitive market, stakeholders of the television industry strive to exploit all the possibilities to get revenues from advertising, but their practices are usually at odds with the comfort of the TV viewers. This paper presents the proof of concept of MiSPOT, a system that brings a non-invasive and fully personalized form of advertising to Interactive Digital TV, targeting both domestic and mobile receivers. MiSPOT employs semantic reasoning techniques to select advertisements suited to the preferences, interests and needs of each individual viewer, and then relies on multimedia composition abilities to blend the advertising material with the TV program he/she is viewing at any time. The advertisements can be set to launch interactive commercials, thus enabling means for the provision of t-commerce services. Evaluation experiments are described to show the technical viability of the proposal, and also to gauge the opinions of end users. Questions about the potential impact and exploitation of this new form of advertising are addressed too.