Industry Perspectives: Internet TV Ready for Prime Time?
In fact, internet TV has the ability to one day rival traditional broadcasting in virtually every facet. One of the burgeoning uses already underway is for sales and marketing "lead-generation." Its ability to quickly and attractively present a company’s key messages, on demand, is paramount—and something traditional TV just can’t challenge.
Internet TV is utilized very effectively by organizations and businesses to promote their products, services, and announcements to attract, inform, and then influence customers and prospects. Here are some of its many technical applications:
• Webinars—Scheduled, live, interactive audio/video event platform delivered over the web featuring slides, polling, Q&A capabilities, email notifications, real-time registrant data, ROI metrics and more. Ideal to train, educate and persuade audiences.
• Webcasting—Instantaneous way to deliver live or recorded content to large or geographically diverse audiences for executive broadcasts, news conferences, product demonstrations, training, e-learning, tradeshows and more.
• Web conferencing—Enables you to share documents, presentations, and other applications over the web and enjoy rich interaction, as if you were face-to-face. You can also demonstrate products and services; deliver training; view, annotate, or edit documents in real time; and more.
• Entertainment media distribution—Entertainment-based content streamed over the web to deliver movies, TV shows, webisodes, and user-generated video for social networking. Many broadcasting organizations maintain an online library for serving up content and/or for enabling users to view select content on demand.
• Internet advertising—Online video-based advertisements promoting products and services, automobiles, real estate and much more in a dynamic, engaging, entertaining, and highly memorable manner.
In terms of lead generation and marketing efforts, these platforms enable organizations to deliver content very easily and cost effectively while also garnering subscriber data. Once a business has this contact information in hand, it can further market its products and services to these potential customers. Internet TV also offers portability and the ability to transfer content between devices. For example, a viewer can download a program or MPEG file from their computer and watch it on their MP3 player, TV, or cell phone, or the viewer can burn it to a DVD. These are all major advantages internet TV has over traditional TV.