[Sydney, AUSTRALIA] BMCMedia, Telstra and the Fantastic Corporation are among a group of companies who have formed the Australian Broadband Media and Advertising Alliance (BMAA), established for the development of standards for the placement of interactive advertising in broadband channels distributed to homes and businesses.
The direction for the next generation of online advertising and marketing content will include setting voluntary industry standards and educating broadband developers on technology, taste and privacy issues.
The move to establish the BMAA follows Telstra’s trial of Fantastic’s multicast broadband platform, the initial development of broadband channels by content providers also testing Fantastic’s multimedia platform, as well as BMCMedia’s trial of the same platform for the aggregation and delivery of interactive advertising on broadband channels.
Australian content providers are producing content for and developing broadband channels using Fantastic’s multimedia platform, including Beyond Online, itvworld, eMAX, and Digital One. These content providers will work with BMCMedia, Telstra and Fantastic to establish the alliance.
According to Fantastic, broadband access presents advertisers with a distribution technology not constrained by bandwidth. The use of both push (point-to-multipoint) and pull (point-to-point) broadband services provides advertisers with a rich multimedia communications platform, for which more sophisicated advertising and marketing content can be developed.
The alliance said it will be seeking membership of the association among online marketing and advertising content developers and publishers, advertising agencies and online sales group working in the broadband environment. “In this fast growing industry, we have recognized that proper self-regulatory controls on advertising standards need to be put in place,” said BMCMedia’s business development director Alan Long.
According to Fantastic, the concept of combining video, audio, software programs, steaming data or other multimedia content and its transmission to intelligent devices such as PCs, set-top boxes or hand held devices where it can be manipulated, is changing the way content will be viewed and received over the next five years.
“We expect to see a marked increase in the number of consumers of broadband services over the next five years,” said Fantastic’s managing director Laurence Cole.
