BSkyB in the UK has launched a new type of DVR held advertising, which uses its existing ‘green button’ technique. Sky is famous for training its customers to use four multi-coloured buttons on its remote control and the Green button is one which places a marker to view something later. Now this is being applied to adverts, which will have an overlay which says ‘press green’ to remind you to view this later or store it. For customers with a Sky Plus DVR, this can be stored for viewing later, and for those that do not have Sky Plus it can issue reminders to customers to watch the adverts when they next play.
The Green button on the Sky DVR is more or less the ‘planner’ button, which keeps an entry of each program you plan to watch either in the future or which has been stored on the DVR.
Sky is calling this new advertising platform On-Demand Advertising or ‘Bookable’ advertising and says it has already signed up film advertising from Warner Brothers with extended film trailers, McMillan Cancer Support, the mobile operator T-Mobile and News Corp sister company Fox.
Through the Green Button, viewers will be offered the opportunity of watching extended versions of ads, finding out more about particular products or services, or accessing related behind-the-scenes or exclusive footage. This could include an extended edit of an existing linear TV ad – where original footage was cut in order to work within the confines of traditional linear ad breaks or it might offer behind the scenes ‘making of’ documentary, outlining how a particularly innovative ad was created.
Many of these ideas, we suspect, come out of work that TiVo has carried out in the US, which News Corp has bought a license to for its satellite TV operators. BSkyB is controlled, but not entirely owned by News Corp and is a UK public company.
Sky said that this type of advertising is particularly well suited to record companies, movie studios and other media or gaming companies with access to content and talent, or advertiser mini-sodes, where the adverts tell a story over time.
Green Button content can range from 2 minutes to 2 hours and the service even allows for the series-linking of advertising content, for those brands wishing to create episodic advertising. Series links ensure than all similar programming is recorded and this is now being applied to adverts as well.
Each piece of advertiser created programming will be made available to Sky homes with standard digi boxes twice a day – viewers will be prompted with an on-screen reminder to watch a selected ad when it becomes available. However, in about half of the 9 million BSkyB homes, which have Sky DVRs, viewers can store the ad rather than watch it from the reminder.
Final testing of the service is underway in readiness for an expected June 2009 launch across 50 Sky owned channels.