Canoe Ventures is the name of a joint venture between all six major cable providers in the U.S. to devise and implement a technology for delivering targeted advertisements to customers via their set-top boxes. The idea was first announced last spring and formalized in June, and to-date the cable companies have spent almost $150 million toward their goal, which foresees an eventual revenue stream of $15 billion per year in the form of commercial time sold. The total television advertising revenue figure per year is somewhere around $70 billion, so they’re talking about biting off a serious chunk.
As that first link points out, the venture is an attempt on the part of the cable companies to get their share of the market before Google beats them to it. Google has been testing selling television ads via AdSense in partnership with Dish Network since that same time frame last year, so the cables were already pretty far behind, and haven’t really closed the gap since. Meanwhile, there was some scuttlebutt that Google would call the cable companies’ bluff by building their own set-top box, but those rumors subsided and the current buzz is that Motorola might integrate Google’s “Android” mobile device platform into its own series of set-tops, since they are already committed to using Android on their cell phone products. Either way, their canoe is paddling frantically to catch up to Google’s cigarette boat.
On Friday, Investor’s Business Daily ran this story about Canoe Ventures, which rehashes much of the same background info, but also says that Canoe hopes to rollout their first set-top box “early this year”, and yesterday DSL Reports said that Comcast has plans to conduct a test in Baltimore and is also planning to build a data warehouse with storage “up to 500 terabytes” to collect viewing habit data on over 16 million customer households.
Of course, all of this will COMPLETELY protect your private personal data, with absolutely NO CHANCE of compromise I’m sure…..(rolls eyeballs disdainfully)
