Contextual ads for IPTV

The grab for IPTV continues, as new start-up Dave.tv offers to not simply aggregate video content, but also serve contextual advertising with it.

It’s no brash claim either, as the person driving Dave.tv is Rex Wong, who was formerly the director of Applied Semantics - the company Google bought for the technology to deliver Google AdSense - contextual advertising for online publishers.

Although Rex Wong says that technology will need a human helping hand, it still stands as a bold move, while various other IPTV start-ups focus on video aggregation than monetisation.

Like any emergent market - and the market for IPTV services is truly emerging - we’re likely to see more companies scramble to be providers than supply actually requires.

By setting themselves up as the monetisers of IPTV through contextual advertising, Dave.tv may yet find themselves in a much stronger position to survive the development of IPTV into the mainstream consumer entertainment markets.

That is, of course, presuming that Dave Lee Roth - whose “Dave TV” slots graced MTV in the 1980’s - doesn’t consider it a violation of copyright…