RELEASE! and DSM 520 Upgrade

Here it is -- the last ActiveTV release...http://www.themediamall.com/dlink/install

Also -- If you are one of the select few who have version 1.04.xx of the D-Link MediaLounge software, you will need to manually upgrade your firmware -- this is because for whatever reason, D-Link doesn't recognize this as an older version (even though we are on .06 now). How do you know what version you have? On your 520, click the setup button on the Remote Control, then scroll down to version and enter.  If it says 1.04.xx or less, you will need to manually upgrade (the auto search won't upgrade you). To manually upgrade, put these 2 files on a usb key and plug the usb key into the front of your DSM 520 -- it will auto-detect and upgrade. This is not an ActiveTV upgrade, but gets you back on D-Link's official upgrade path so that you will get all future upgrades automatically (including the ActiveTV one posted above, which will be released by D-Link in the coming weeks).

Enjoy!

Video Advertising - Keep it open!

I am thrilled about the eMarketer stat — behavioral targeting is projected to grow to a $4.8 billion market by 2012 -- and it seems online video will be taking over the majority share of that.  One of the barriers that has been raised to behavioral targeting with online video is the fact that the cookie data (which stores the users behavior, enabling the ad network to decide which ad to display based on the users behavior -- aka behavioral targeting) often resides in the player -- which, of course, are not standardized.  Eric Franchi raises the issue in his article Behavioral Targeting and Online Video: Making It a Reality: “Cookie data may be utilized to deliver video as it does now for display, but not in every player format (formats being Flash, Windows Media and Real Player to name a few).”

We came across this barrier recently when trying to integrate an ad network into MediaMall.  Since we use our own player that enables the video to play on the TV vs. PC, we needed an ad network that didn't require the cookie data be stored in the player.  We found that, in fact, the logic for using cookies can reside in the page, in standardized jscript, regardless of what player is being used to actually play the media. And that cookie intelligence can then just instruct the player (whatever player it is) to play a given ad once it makes a decision on what to play.  Both tremormedia and spotxchangeuse jscript in the page vs. logic in the player. So — the fact that so many ad networks bake their intelligence/logic into the player, instead of keeping it in jscript in the page, which is video-format agnostic will slow the growth of the category.  I hope to see more ad networks adopting the open approach!