Bringing accountability to the TV screen

Tivo and Amazon team up to deliver you an integrated HSN-style experience- when you watch any program. This is an interesting step in the continued blurring of the lines between TV and the Internet - it actually resembles the Google/Videoegg overlay ads very closely - just that there's only one "bidder" - i.e. Amazon and the medium is your TV. As this is limited to Tivo at this point, it will remain an interesting experiment, but I'm expecting this sort of overlay integration to become mainstream within the next 3 years. The big remaining question will be whether the merchants will be able to push this to a CPA model or whether the TV gods will insist on traditional CPM pricing. As usual, Tivo boldy steps forward with this attempt.