Bill Gates on IPTV

Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI reports on a speech by Bill Gates at Microsoft's Strategic Account Summit online advertising conference.

I thought these excerpts on the future of TV were particularly interesting:

TV [is changing] from being a simply broadcast medium to being a targeted medium .... Having every household in America watching a different video feed has become practical.

It's a dramatic change in TV. ... Broadcast infrastructure over these next five years will not be viewed as competitive. The end-user experience and the creativity, the new content that will emerge using the capabilities of this environment will be so much dramatically better that broadcast TV will not be competitive.

And in this environment, the ads will be targeted, not just targeted to the neighborhood level, but targeted to the viewer. ... We'll actually not just know the household that that viewing is taking place in, we'll actually know who the viewers of that show are ... It's a very rich environment.

See also my August 2005 post, "Personalization for TV", that discusses some of Mark Cuban's and Chris Anderson's thoughts on IPTV and the need for discovery and personalization.

See also my Dec 2004 post, "BitTorrent, Internet TV, and personalization", exploring a Wired article on IPTV by Clive Thompson.

See also my Jan 2006 post, "A Google personalized TV ad engine?", that looks at thoughts from Robert Cringely about how TV advertising could be less annoying if it was more targeted.