Microsoft's whole plan with the xbox was to sell the hardware below cost, and then to crank out the software and make the real profit off game sales. If you're buying the hardware and supplying your own software, you are, in effect, costing them money.
I work for a company, whose parent company incubated a small project originally dubbed "TAB" for "Targetted Advertising Box." The idea was basically to build a website where customers could sign up, choose their preference in advertisements, and then they would receive a set top box that would intercept the cable signal and replace commercial with those targetted advertisements. Since this box would be just like a cable box and contain account information, you could also click a button on the remote to e-mail you some more information about a product, or to show more ads like that one. What was the payoff? They'd pay your cable bill.
I would not mind a system like that in the least, and with digital cable boxes already containing broadband functionality (tv listings, ordering PPV without a phoneline, etc.), it would seem to work reasonably well.
Thoughts?
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Microsoft's whole plan with the xbox was to sell the hardware below cost, and then to crank out the software and make the real profit off game sales. If you're buying the hardware and supplying your own software, you are, in effect, costing them money.
I work for a company, whose parent company incubated a small project originally dubbed "TAB" for "Targetted Advertising Box." The idea was basically to build a website where customers could sign up, choose their preference in advertisements, and then they would receive a set top box that would intercept the cable signal and replace commercial with those targetted advertisements. Since this box would be just like a cable box and contain account information, you could also click a button on the remote to e-mail you some more information about a product, or to show more ads like that one. What was the payoff? They'd pay your cable bill. I would not mind a system like that in the least, and with digital cable boxes already containing broadband functionality (tv listings, ordering PPV without a phoneline, etc.), it would seem to work reasonably well. Thoughts?