AMSTERDAM — Norwegian web browser maker Opera is having a busy International Broadcasting Convention show.
It announced IPTV firms Amino and AirTies will adopt Opera’s software on their devices, giving Opera greater traction for its ambitions to break in to interactive TV. And the firm also announced it is basing the latest version of its browser software development kit on Google’s new browser rendering engine.
“We are the first company to launch a commercial-grade product based on the Blink/Chromium SDK,” Opera TV SVP Aneesh Rajaram tells Beet.TV in this video interview at IBC. “We’re the first company to make this in to a TV-grade product.”
For Opera, all this effort taking its traditional desktop and mobile browser to TV is to unleash monetization opportunities through new-wave browser contexts, an app store and its ad platform.
“In the future, we will have the opportunity to recognize what the user is watching,” Rajaram says. “We will know which ad is playing. Since we have the web engine running on the TV, we can serve the ad relevant to when the 30-second spot is playing.”
The effect would be to let viewers hyperlink from the classical 30-second TV ad to a directly related web campaign.
