Today's marketplace presents many disadvantages that lead to consumer frustration. While consumers may have many ways to gather information about available goods and services, such as visiting stores, browsing the World Wide Web, browsing catalogs, viewing advertisements on television, in magazines and newspapers, and others, such collection of basic information about available goods and services, their features and their prices may be tedious and time-consuming. To find a particular product or verify its price, the consumer typically may need to visit several stores across a wide area. Another consumer may choose to browse the World Wide Web in search of the product, perhaps incurring various communication charges for being online if dial-up modem is used, or aimlessly navigating through hundreds of web sites all of which may point to the same product in the same online store. Yet another consumer may choose to spend hours on the telephone navigating irritating automated attendants, trying to reach a human who can answer questions. This process wastes the consumer's valuable time, especially when the search fails. Moreover, information is not always available when it is needed. When a consumer has an immediate need for product or service information, it may be nearly impossible to gather the information quickly, especially when the consumer does not know where to look for the information.
With the advent of the Internet, a new avenue for commerce has been opened—“electronic commerce”. An electronic marketplace, just like a traditional marketplace, must support the basic process of commerce wherein offers to sell or buy are made, offers are accepted, and considerations are paid. A viable marketplace must also address side-effects of commerce such as issues of security, privacy, and confidence or trust; otherwise, even if the basic process works, consumers and providers will not feel comfortable enough to participate in the marketplace.
A practical and viable electronic marketplace involves the exchange of market information, as well as the more obvious trading for goods and services. From a consumer's point of view, shopping is a means of gathering data about goods and services offered. This data is used by the consumer to compare and rank offerings and to make decisions about purchases. From a provider's point of view, consumer shopping is an opportunity to gather data about consumer needs and interests. This data is used by the provider to improve product and service offerings.
To accommodate both, consumers and providers, an electronic marketplace introduced new information providing services which overcome some of the deficiencies in electronic commerce. One of the innovations was the electronic shopping agent.
A typical online shopping agent's objective is to assist shoppers in making the best possible buying decisions. Particularly, an objective of such agent-based technology is to put an end to manual searches and site-hopping, and instead, automate the collection of information, including pricing, feature sets, and more from various sites across the World Wide Web, thereby making comparative shopping easy and efficient for users. For example, one of the most utilized features of a typical shopping agent is notifying a user of lower online prices when the user browses supported shopping sites.
Even with the colossal potential of the Internet, current online shopping agents still present various disadvantages to a consumer, thus frustrating the establishment of a viable virtual marketplace. For example, the current online agents simply act as advanced versions of a typical search engine, where the improvement concept is searching within various shopping sites and looking for the best deal. The agents are one-dimensional as they are limited to the search of only one particular product and limited to the databases of only participating online stores. Current online shopping agents lack the functionality of recommending to the consumer based on his/her preferences other products which are similar to the one requested.
Moreover, only Internet users can benefit from the current online shopping agents which only look within the World Wide Web. This leaves the other share of the marketplace, the non-computer consumers, unexplored. A television viewer, for example, while watching the latest episode of a television program, might be interested in acquiring a laptop used by one of the program's characters. There are currently no available means for obtaining information about that particular laptop, let alone obtaining such information readily. The only possible solution would be to note the brand of the computer, which in itself sometimes would be difficult or impossible, go onto the Internet or other research tool and search for that particular laptop. In addition to wasting valuable time, this may lead to thousands of hits which would frustrate the consumer even more.
Television shopping channels provide a consumer with an option to shop while watching television. However, these programs are separate from other conventional programs showing narrative content such as dramas, situation comedies, movies, etc.
In addition, while data casting systems may already exist, i.e. video stream with embedded information for interactive use, the broadcaster is the party preparing the content and inserting the information, thus acting on behalf of the seller or advertiser and not on behalf of a consumer.
Although interactive television systems already exist in today's marketplace, i.e. through the use of set-top boxes, the commerce side of interactive television has not been fully explored yet. The term “set-top box” describes a specialized computer which translates incoming digital signals into a form suitable for viewing on a standard television set. The source of the signals could be a digital satellite or terrestrial broadcast, a cable television connection, or a video-on-demand program which is typically requested across a phone line. Other uses for the set-top box may include control of interactive viewing, for example with a home-shopping channel or WebTV™; the set-top box may also decrypt signals on subscription or pay-per-view channels.
The new set-top boxes may utilize Philips Semiconductors' Trimedia™ VLIW (very long instruction word) multimedia processor, a powerful single-chip multimedia platform, to integrate email, video telephony and Internet browsing technology for use with in-home digital television. With the advancement in television technology, entertainment, information and media delivery channels are increasing in number and changing their original purpose.
In the traditional broadcast model of TV viewing, the TV is tuned to a channel and the user consumes or views the program, as well as the paid advertising or commercials, from that channel. This is known as the “push” model where the content is packaged, predetermined and delivered practically unaltered throughout the delivery chain. Internet, on the other hand, enables a different type of delivery wherein vast quantities of information are at the user's disposal. Contrary to the broadcast model, the user has to actively reach for the information to consume it. This is the “pull” model where content is available at various locations and presentation formats. The user has to locate the content and consume some or all of it.
Both models provide means to help user's navigation or to attract their attention. Broadcast content is advertised (e.g. TV guide) and adapted to be in line with specific (targeted) user groups, but have not offered mechanisms for customization beyond choice of viewing. Internet services offer customization mechanisms through which the user can state a set of preferences according to which content is filtered and presented.