Interactive TV in the UK

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract:Interactive Television (iTV) has been around for several decades. Most people have probably heard the term before. Having started in the USA with some trials it is now conquering the UK. The first interactive services on Digital TV (DTV) have been broadcasted 18 months ago and are continuously growing in number. The four platform providers – Sky, NTL, ONdigital and Telewest – are trying to make their interactive services as appealing as possible and are, of course, offering new advertising opportunities for advertisers on that new medium.The aims of this project are to analyse those new advertising opportunities and compare them to advertising on traditional TV and the Internet and find out whether advertising on iTV combines their strengths and overcomes some of their weaknesses. In order to achieve this, the literature review focuses on the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of advertising on traditional TV and the Internet and also provides a good overview over the iTV market in the UK and the current developments.The UK is leading the way in the development of iTV and is even supposed to be 12 to 18 months ahead of the USA. The market is highly competitive and fragmented with the four different platform providers offering three different forms of receiving DTV, of which satellite is leading in the numbers of subscribers. The predictions of the DTV uptake are very positive and the spendings for advertising on iTV are supposed to be tremendous within the next couple of years.The results of the interviews carried out with iTV experts from the platform providers, media and advertising agencies show that advertising on iTV indeed combines the strengths and overvomes some weaknesses and has the potential to be more successful than its two closest relatives. Due to the fact that it is still in its infancy and companies are just starting to test this new medium and no success stories have been published so far, advertising on i