Marketers Strike Back

By The End of the 1990s, the possible effects upon traditional television practices and programme forms brought about by the move to digital broadcasting and the introduction of the digital video recorder were hotly contested within the industry. The distinct capabilities of digital processing of the television signal—high definition, channel proliferation, and interactive services—together with the time-shifting and ad-zapping abilities of the digital video recorder, caused many to question whether advertisers would be able to reach increasingly fragmented and recalcitrant viewers armed with new devices to avoid conventional TV commercials. At the end of 1999, the nascent practice of virtual advertising—the ability to map imported video material seamlessly into the illusionistic space of live action—was seen by many within the TV industry as a timely technological counter-weapon to the domestic television viewer newly armed with anticommercial digital defences.

Advertising · Broadcasting (networking) · Business · Computer security · Digital broadcasting · Digital recording · Digital television · Digital video · Interactive television · Multimedia · Space (punctuation) · Telecommunications · Television industry · Videocassette recorder · Virtual space · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media