With Television selling 30 seconds of airtime during the Superbowl for a whopping 2.4 million dollars, it was only a matter of time before SPAM, pop ups and banner advertising were not enough for internet marketers. Ad supported video will and has begun to appear online before and after free or low cost video downloads. Site embedded infomercials and even cell phone ready clips can be seen popping up on PDA's and media enriched hand held devices.



According to a recent study internet users preferred ad supported video to video that asked consumers to pay money for the un-advertisement riddled version. The benefit of supporting and developing ad supported video is that in essence the advertisers will pay for most or all of the download keeping costs low for consumers and making more free watching with the implementation of ad supported video available to all online.

One initial way to avoid watching ad supported video is by grabbing the mouse and ‘scrubbing' past the commercials seems fairly easy. On handheld devices without play, pause and fast forward and rewind enabled touch screens, skipping the ad supported video portions at the beginning and end of the clips is not an option. This is what makes mobile ad supported video spots so valuable.

New ad supported video companies are springing up offering companies a technological leg up landing their advertisements on peoples computer screens. Ad Infuse and Minick deliver personalized mobile advertising and video streaming solutions to Swiss COM mobile customers in Switzerland. Rather than paying for downloads of subscriptions these mobile users must watch a ten to twenty second advertisement at the beginning and end of each program.

In the UK one million customers registered for the UK 's mobile operators' ad-supported video service in the first six months of service. Rhythm NewMedia designed their streaming service to include short clips of news, comedy, animation, and film shorts with a pre and post roll advertising spot. The companies that have signed up include Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Unilever and Nivea. Because a cell phone gives companies a lot more demographic information on consumers than a television can, the ads are effective at targeting likely potential customers and have been very successful.

In addition to knowing what adds the mobile user may be interested in efforts in the U.S. from a company called Audlitude enables the content owner to see other shows as well as merchandise they may be interested in purchasing based on their selections thus far in the system. This gives advertisers an entirely new method to target audiences of premium content across the web. In the future possible engines to localize advertising based on GPS tracking devices.

Google also has a trial of ad supported video which incorporates adds in an unobtrusive top page banner and finishes each video with a thirty second spot. Its major competition in ad-supported video has been Apple owner of itunes which is so widely used it is easy to transition to incorporate video sales as well. ABC has also done well online syndication of shows like shows like Lost and Alias.