Satellite

Dish Network is looking to find partners to potentially launch a mobile-video service with the 700-Megahertz wireless spectrum it purchased earlier this year for $712 million, officials said Tuesday.

USTelematics is skipping the satellites that KVH Industries and Sirius Backseat TV rely upon and betting on WiMax wireless technology to bring TV to your car. It will deliver IPTV to its Voyager in-car entertainment systems and has announced a "mobilecast" program called 4VDO that will deliver broadcast and video programming.

Unilever made a bit of an advertainment splash last year with its online series "The Rookie." Sponsored by Degree deodorant, The Rookie featured a counter-terrorism plotline, and ran for six episodes at three- to five-minutes each. This year's series -- returning to DegreeRookie.com with brand elements intact -- will also air on DirecTV and Comcast On Demand. Fox, which produces the shows, is appealing to a niche: the desirable 25 to 34 year old male demographic who won't think to ask why Jason Blaine is still a rookie in Year Two. (Yes, yes, I know -- it's a fictional compression of time thing.) 

Disney-ABC Television Group and its affiliates announced a deal that expands the network's ability to make content available on an on-demand basis through cable and satellite TV and makes affiliates partners in such offerings. Under the new agreement, the affiliates will get one spot each half hour in ABC programming that is made available by cable and satellite TV operators on an on-demand basis. Service requires the fast-forward function to be disabled so that users cannot skip spots.

HSN has been airing interactive advertising on the satellite TV services. The ads look like traditional 30-second commercials, but they're enhanced with an interactive button. Click the button with your remote, and voila, you're watching HSN. The Tampa Tribune points out that this sort of thing could come to annoy the networks on which you place ads, but how's this for 2.0 Marketing? Advertisers might actually be willing to pay more if networks lose enough viewers (to their interactive click-throughs, of course).

The things you find on YouTube.... Budweiser is trying to score with an advergame it has run on DISH. While branded gaming already has a big presence online, it's still fairly new to interactive television. The Budweiser campaign offers plenty of choices, from checking out Budweiser's "Beerleaders," to playing a little soccer and trying to score goals -- all with your set-top remote. One of interactivity's chief pleasures is gaming, which advertisers are beginning to leverage.

The 24/7 news channels -- CNN, Fox and MSNBC -- are crawling their way to keeping viewers engaged. Each is experimenting with running its news crawl throughout commercial breaks. ESPN News has done this for years as a way to give viewers the content they've sought when the network must break to pay bills. It's a sound idea -- and might work even better if the networks hold back fresh items for when the ads play.

Two big metrics deals were signed last week which might finally give Nielsen a run for its money. CBS signed with TiVo to try to learn a little more about viewer behavior through its second-by-second ratings, and DirecTV is partnering with TNS Media Research to do much the same thing. The goal is to go beyond simple head counts and try to determine who's doing precisely what when the commercials start to play.