As the Director of Account Services at Liquidus, one of my duties is to not just stay knowledgeable of our competitors offerings but just as important, to stay in step with our peers product offerings as well. One such "peer" company is 'This Technology LLC', which has the aim to put some oomph in the cable industry's notoriously peripheral video-on-demand (VOD) advertising. They have developed an open-source translation software that allows programmers to splice ads into web based videos. This software is called Spotlink and the goal is to allow programmers to insert ads directly into cable VOD without having to purchase separate systems. Okay, here is what Spotlink does: In the past, programming networks were required to purchase proprietary campaign management systems in order to interface with MSOs (cable operators) for their Dynamic Advertising Insertion (DAI). This commonly resulted in delays or complete failures of deployment.

"The days of networks being forced to purchase new campaign management systems to get DAI campaigns off the ground are over," said Jeffrey Sherwin, CEO of This Technology. "With SpotLink, the networks are finally free to use their proven, cost-efficient broadband ad servers to interface with any campaign management system being used by any operator."

Since Liquidus works closely with both Comcast Corp and Time Warner Inc., and Canoe Ventures LLC (the cross-MSO advanced ad consortium that counts both Comcast ad TWC among its supporters) is pushing This Technology's open-source software to help pump up VOD ad efforts, we could see a bump in ad revenue that has recently been given to the web.

Canoe notes that, along with EBIF, Spotlink can give MSOs a more standard way to connect with this new free "plug-and-play" tech. We'll see. EBIF has been slow to roll-out over the past umpteenth years with constant setbacks, delays, and shoulder shrugging from the MSO heads. Perhaps Spotlink will move things along quickly. But I'll believe it when I see it (on VOD.)

See also: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=204403&site=lr_cable