Rand, that makes sense. But it isn't what we've been talking about. What was being discussed was a "helper" disk that would work in conjunction with Internet advertising, so that the big videos would be pulled locally when you happen to surf across a reference to them.
A patently silly idea, I think.
Sure, you can send out advertisments and catalogs on CDs or DVDs. It's been done, notably in the consumer arena by auto companies, and commercially by companies with large industrial catalogs (for example, a company I worked for several years ago did one for 3Com).
But what does this have to do with Internet advertising? Yes, I know that one of NETZ's companies does this sort of thing, but it would appear to be a totally separate thing. I know there is some demand out there for this, although I note that the aformentioned company that I worked for no longer does this, apparently not finding it profitable.
Now, there's a combination of the two ideas that makes SOME sense (though it hasn't come into widespread use) and that's having large files associated with a single site on a CD or DVD. In fact, I've been involved in a project that did this in the past. You have to have a pretty motivated user base - typically users of a catalog that use the catalog daily. The "structure" of the catalog is on the web site, so that it can be kept up to date. But images, videos, etc. are pulled from the CD (unless they've been updated).
This sounded pretty promising 4 years ago, and the company that I worked for at the time did a couple of these projects. It hasn't proven popular in the long-run, though, perhaps because of increases in Internet bandwidth, and perhaps because it's just too darn inconvenient. |
