ITGumbo: spicing IT up

In the past week, several articles have come out about television networks making episodes of their shows available online. In his weekly column, David Pogue raised some excellent points about the major networks in the United States doing this and how ads are shown, while web-strategist, Jeremiah Owyang also mentioned in a blog post the benefits of watching episodes of his favorite shows online and how necessary it is for the networks and advertisers to be savvy about it in order for them to survive.

Of course, my problem is that you can't watch any videos on American television network sites from outside the country, but that's a different topic... or perhaps not. Variety International has published a web exclusive that Israeli TV programs from the television station Reshet TV will soon be available for online viewing and downloading using Israel's HIRO-Media Ltd.'s downloading technology.

Users will be able to download ad-supported whole episodes of Reshet's programs that can't be stripped of the ads. They will also be free to legally distribute the episodes anyway they want to, including on file-sharing sites and social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. While advertisers might be scratching their heads wondering how viewer-demographics will be traced and measured with users having such free reign, a blog post from the Digital TV Weblog explains that "Hiro's codec, a program used to encode and decode digital data, will report back viewing figures to content providers so they can charge advertisers for how many people watched their ads."

Additionally, the Variety International article adds that "users have the option of registering anonymous demographic information to choose what type of advertisements they see, allowing for more personalized, localized or relevant campaigns."

The article also mentions that this technology is patent-pending. However, if this patent gets approved, I certainly hope the American television networks will implement the technology. Maybe then I'll finally be able to watch last week's episode of Desperate Housewives on ABC's website instead of watching it on YouTube or Veoh.