Back in April the industry got a whiff of Google's future IPTV plans when the company sent out its feelers for IPTV talent [1]: engineers, programmers and product managers. Now, OpenTV, an IPTV middleware company, has announced that its CTO, Vincent Dureau, has joined Google at a "senior engineering role." Dureau was responsible for developing OpenTV's key technologies, global business relationships and, in the early days, building its engineering team from scratch. Most interestingly, Dureau took the lead of OpenTV's advanced advertising technologies, even penning a white paper that reads: "We believe that addressable advertising, where specific video ads are targeted to specific audiences will become central to advertising on digital television within the next 5 years... advertisers will be ready to pay premium rates to cable operators who can demonstrate increased efficiency of their advertising network through targeting."
Just last month, two research scientists at Google developed a way for your computer to quickly identify which programs you're watching on TV and feed you personalized content based on that information. While the scientists harp on the increased personalization aspects of it, you can bet Google has its eye on an advanced advertising platform that repurposes its keyword advertising scheme for TV. Looks like Dureau could be the one spearheading this initiative.
For more on Google's IPTV plans:
- see this press release [2] from OpenTV on Dureau's departure
- take a look at this blog entry [3] about Google's personalized TV concept
Links:
[1] http://www.fierceiptv.com/story/google-seeks-software-engineers-for-iptv/2006-04-13
[2] http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060802/sfw092.html?.v=61
[3] http://www.firewhite.com/weblog/the_mass_personalization_of_television