ft.com/techblog

You’re watching a video on your PC of a man and a woman walking across a hotel lobby. You mouse over them, and words appear on the the screen. She’s wearing a bustier pencil dress, you could buy it for $35. Him? A Remus Uomo jacket, $95. Click on either figure, and a browser pops up to take you straight to a page where you can buy their clothes.

Yes, it sounds like another of those internet pipe dreams, circa 1998. But this technology will actually be trialled next month by an (unnamed) big US retailer. That is according to James Colborn, who has been working on new ideas like this at Adcenter, Microsoft’s belated attempt to get into the advertising game against Google and Yahoo! (You can see a demonstration here.)

Will it catch on? Who knows. But some traditional media organisations are finally building up the courage to take the leap into the unknown (viz the BBC’s deal today with YouTube,) and more experimentation like this is badly needed. The BBC’s public funding insulates it from some of the pressures faced by more commercial entities, but if they are to have any hope of drawing more video content to the Web, internet companies need to prove they can make money from it, and soon.

March 2nd, 2007 in Internet | Permalink