By Laurie Sullivan
Ordering a pizza during this year’s Super Bowl could become as easy as pushing a button on the TV remote to search on and call your favorite local pizzeria.
Zodiac Interactive moved Internet search onto the television Wednesday with a feature that lets consumers find and call local businesses from their TV. The company is working to offer the service through its existing customers Cablevision and Cox Communications for which it supports video games, and possibly, Time Warner.
Cable and satellite operators may be close to adding Interactive TV services, including local search and click-through VoIP calling, as they try to keep up with services offered by online companies like Google and Yahoo. But it’s not clear if consumers are ready to dive in.
“We’ve heard about interactive TV for about 10 years and now we see resurgence as cable and satellite providers try to compete with Google and other online companies,” said Michael Cai, director at research firm Parks Associates. “There hasn’t been proven demand for these types of applications, but carriers believe they better start offering services, so if there is demand they don’t get left behind.”
About 20 million digital set-top boxes will ship in 2007, up from 19 million in 2006, according to Parks Associates.
Through the set-top box, Zodiac’s TVLocalSearch will let consumers pull up a sidebar menu along side network programming to search on local business. It then gives an option to connect via telephone through Zodiac’s TVCallMe service with a click of the remote.
Combined, TVLocalSearch and TVCallMe work much like eBay’s click-to-call service, which allows web surfers to search on a business, then click a hyperlink to initiate a call through Skype’s voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service.
While the search service is free to consumers, businesses will bid for the top position in the search query listing. Similar to Google Adware, businesses will bid for specific searchable keywords on a per-click basis. If a business wants to rally for a higher position on the list, they might bid $0.50
per click, rather than $0.40 cents per click.
Cable and satellite companies also will have an option to offer subscribers added services. For example, restaurants or mortgage brokers might pay extra to display menus or mortgage rates that consumers can access.
“We’ve had some trials in localized communities of about 10,000 people where cable subscribers could press a button on their TV remote during this 30-minute ad to receive a pizza at their home for $9.99,” said Zodiac's CEO Michael Rivkin.