The MiSPOT System: Personalized Publicity and Marketing over Interactive Digital TV

The development of Interactive Digital TV bears a great potential for electronic commerce, which remains heavily underexploited to date. The early initiatives to harness these technologies rely oil the advertising techniques traditionally employed by the television industry, which have proven deficiencies related to viewers' comfort, locality and targeting. Furthermore, out of dedicated channels, there are very few attempts to provide interactive commercial functionalities through the TV, for example to sell products or to hire services. This chapter presents an overview of a system called MiSPOT that introduces Solutions to these problems in two levels: (i) to advertise items that match the preferences and needs of the viewers, without interfering with their enjoyment of the TV programs; and (ii) to assemble specialized interactive applications that provide them with tailor-made commercial functionalities. These Solutions are grounded oil techniques from the Semantic Web, and are valid for both domestic TV receivers and mobile ones.