>But without a separate unicast two-way channel, you're back to transmitting the ads that are targetted to individual customers over the broadcast channel. That's what makes this inefficient. Even very low bit rate spam will add up to a lot of bandwidth as you increase the number of uniquely targetted ads you broadcast, and use of the carousel just compounds the problem. For a broadcast-only settopbox with pots backchannel we can't really rely on a unicast model. The priority model lets advertisers pay a premium for immediate delivery of their ads to the cache, however. Its just a tweak to their business model - do we update when we want and pay premium, or do we stagger our advertising and pay less but have to do some management of when we send ads out and the time it takes for them to arrive. With ITV-capable STBs one can also go the route of offering advertisers 'less-than' services - i.e. a banner ad on the EPG screen, etc. I am really surprised advertisers in the TV world are so clueless that they have yet to latch onto the idea of an ad on the EPG screen or configuration screen - to me this is primo real estate, since there is no skipping past it. >It's all a matter of degree, of course. The more individualized the ads, the better it is to use a unicast medium for their transfer. Over cable, no problem. You have the unicast two-way channel right there. Yup, exactly. Well, as long as all the boxes don't hammer the headend at the same time :). Cheers Kon ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.