TheBuzz
TheBuzz
Another day, another
kind of interactivityOceanic Time Warner Cable of Hawaii starts taking a bigger bite out of the pie of statewide advertising dollars this week.
It is launching iTV addressable advertising, which adds a layer of interactivity to commercials on Oceanic's digital service.
Oceanic President Nate Smith describes iTV as "the engine that does the pulling."
Advertisers can embed into commercials icons customers activate using their digital remotes. The viewer then gets a message about a special sale or event.
City Mill might have a different special at each location and the technology allows the company to send messages specific to those stores' communities simultaneously, according to MaryAnn Sacharski, Oceanic director of advertising sales.
First Hawaiian Bank will be the first advertiser to use the service, which is making its nationwide debut on Oceanic. The system was designed by Massachusetts-based Navic Networks.
The company has previously been a test market for new services and it is bucking national trends in delivery of video programming.
An annual Federal Communications Commission report on competition in video markets found that cable remains the dominant technology for video programming delivery, but its market share continues to decline.
Nationally the number of cable subscribers grew 0.4 percent to 68.8 million. Noncable program distributors grew by 9 percent to 21.1 million subscribers. They include providers of direct broadcast satellite, wireless cable, broadcast television and video sales and rentals, among others.
Oceanic is not losing significant market share, Smith said.
"We're certainly not experiencing great growth, but we're not experiencing a reduction in our growth rate, either," he said.
Rate growth is another matter. Cable prices grew by an average of 6.3 percent between June 2001 and June 2002, according to the FCC report.
"The cost of our programming is going up a lot more than the 6 percent quoted by the FCC," Smith said. The whole increase does not get passed along to the subscriber because "the consumer sees only so much of a value and to the extent that we can cover some of the cost that's fine. But if we raise rates to cover all the cost of increased programming we lose subscribers. There's some of it we just have to absorb," said Smith.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com