I mentioned this a while ago as one of my great personal ambitions for 2007: To bring VoIP Calls to IpTV. I find it surprising that the European interactive companies have yet to explore the possibilities of local advertising through IpTV. The beauty of this solution is that it is truly triple play namely integration of television, telephony with local search technology. In Europe our partner eStara is interested in finding partnerships to develop similar featers for Iptv so please contact me for more details.

Zodiac’s TVCallME allows iTV operators to offer paid search and hyper-localized advertising,” said Alexander Libkind, COO of Zodiac Interactive in the USA. “With TVCallME, viewers can simply find their favorite restaurants and click to receive a call from them immediately. As the service expands, viewers will have access to menus right on their TV. With Zodiac, cable operators will reinvent the TV Dinner.”

Libkind continued, “Operators can move beyond the traditional advertising CPM model and earn a transactional fee on every call. Unlike other transactional services that require deep integration with vendor’s back-end systems, TVCallME allows any vendor to display its services in a yellow pages-like environment with an immediate call to action - it’s a truly unique and instantly profitable advertising model for iTV operators and local businesses.”

“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.”