Menori

Parts of the jigsaw are falling into place now. Today the Financial Times covered the new alliance between Google and BSkyB. Schmidt and Murdoch are on the verge of something very big. Potentially a paradigm shift in broadcasting.

Targetted adverts based upon the programs you’re watching which get recorded by your Sky Plus box. It’s not really took anyone by surprise but it does mark the first step in the execution of a strategy that saw News Corp (who own BSkyB and MySpace) and Google who recently bought YouTube. Instead of scheduled general adverts, you’ll get schduled targetted ones. I’ll be interested to see what adverts I get presented with. I assume the link up with MySpace and my general Google account for email etc. will provide the additional information needed to get a really targetted slice of adverts. Otherwise friends of mine who enjoy romantic comedies are only going to get adverts about chocolate, shoes, sanitary towels and yoghurt.

So bearing in mind that I don’t use MySpace and I don’t use Blogger anymore this alliance is going to lose out on the additional information they could glean about my interests that I would blog about. Realistically if I used MySpace, watched YouTube videos every day, emailed with Gmail, blogged with Blogger, watched Sky and read The Sun online this alliance would know an awful lot about me. The one advert I’d expect to see coming up every ad break during Lost would be one for Apple iPods or Macs (I can’t think of many products for Ninjas).

BSkyB’s move to work with Google comes after they recently suspended a video-on-demand download service that had been a partnership with Microsoft.. Earlier in the year Sky had launched a service that would allow users of Windows XP Media Centre Edition to download videos. But the service was suspended after fears that security flaws in the file format that Microsoft uses were too risky.

Times are certainly a changing.