According to a new ABI Research report, the amount of Web-enabled electronics will at least triple in the next five years, allowing more and more consumers to connect to the Internet via their video game consoles, TVs and Blu-ray players.
There are currently 60 million electronics components worldwide that are Web-enabled and ABI says there will be over 200 million by 2013. Internet-protocol-enabled TVs, which are the standard in Japan, will become commonplace in the USA, adds the report.
“One of the main facets of multi-screen offerings will be Web-based user interfaces and rich Web content across all three screens,” ABI research director Michael Wolf said in a statement. “Beyond the PC and mobile environment is the Internet-connected TV screen.”
More and more TV makers are integrating Ethernet ports into their TVs and Profile 2.0 Blu-ray players are doing the same.
Companies such as Netflix have encouraged the pushing of Internet capability by signing deals to have digital copies of movies streamed directly through Blu-ray players or TVs.
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Toshiba CEO Atsutoshi Nishida has finally talked out about his company’s decision to drop HD DVD and went as far as to say that the format did not “stand a chance” following Warner’s decision to drop the format for Blu-ray.
Citing the Warner decision, Nishida said that the format would have only had 20% of the software market share and that Warner’s decision sealed the format war’s fate.
“One has to take calculated risks in business, but it’s also important to switch gears immediately if you think your decision was wrong,” explained Nishida. “We were doing this to win, and if we weren’t going to win then we had to pull out, especially since consumers were already asking for a single standard.”
In the wake of the end of the HD format war, Toshiba said it would focus more on upconverting standard-def DVD players and PCs as well as HD digital downloads.
“We’ve been developing technologies in [the video downloads] area already, but now that we don’t have the HD DVD business, I want to put even more energy into that,”added Nishida.
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Google-owned Youtube has introduced a new ad platform to turn the heads of advertisers. In addition to traditional text ads YouTube now allows search term based adverts that are displayed on the top of the search results. Like the ones on Google search the YouTube search term ads are separated from the actual results by their background color.
Costing Google a hefty $1.76 billion YouTube has not yet turned into a money making machine. However, the integration of the new ad platform was not as an easy task as one could’ve thought.
“In hindsight, it is a natural transition for YouTube to make. We’ve been working on this for months. The key was, we wanted to make sure we got it right. There are a lot of intricacies involved. YouTube is a video discovery platform. We’ve been integrating with Google AdWords for some time, and now we’re at a place where it can be win and win,” said YouTube product manager Matthew Liu to CNET News.
There are no limitations regarding who can buy the ads but due to the formula used to determine ad placements - combining popularity of the video and money paid - companies will most likely buy off the most popular search terms. There will be however a chance to buy yourself the 15 seconds - or minutes in this case - of fame.
Search ads are currently used only in the U.S. but will be expanded to other countries and regions in the future as well.
