This is the flyer we made available to delegates at the British Business Embassy at Lancaster House on 3rd August 2012 where we had a virtual exhibition. All interested parties please contact me
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Pbr bbe flyer for use at the show 01
1. P L A Y B A C K R E W A R D S
’magic in your pocket’
I.Playback Holdings Limited is a new company formed to exploit a revolutionary television
advertising platform called Playback Rewards (PBR), to be deployed across the UK from late-
2012. The new platform is protected by various granted patents and lodged patent applica-
tions. It has a core management team in place. Its chairman is David Elstein, former CEO of
Channel 5, former Director of Programmes, Thames TV, former Head of Programming, BSkyB
and former board director of Virgin Media Inc. (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Elstein ). Our technology will be first rolled out on the
Raspberry Pi computer - details of what we are doing are currently under development on our
website at www.playbackrewards.com
PBR rewards TV households for watching advertisements. A typical TV viewer watches 47 advertisements every day. If
that viewer switched only 60% of advertisements viewed to those that earned rewards (cash and/or vouchers), his earn-
ings from PBR would easily exceed £100 to £150 per annum.
Targeted advertising is the holy grail of the TV and advertising industries. In the US, experts forecast that by 2015 the
annual revenues from targeted advertising will exceed $11 billion. But in the UK and Europe it has stalled because
subscription-based services and internet-based advertising sales houses know so much about their customers that it
would be difficult to avoid claims of abuse of privacy and data protection rights if they targeted them with tailored ad-
vertisements. PBR’s technology completely avoids all privacy and data protection issues.
PBR is being developed in three phases (Proof of Concept; UK Commercial Rollout and International Rollout) to deliver tar-
geted adverts to TV viewers and reward viewers in cash and vouchers. Since the adverts are targeted, they earn a pre-
mium for PBR while the viewer gets a standard amount no matter how targeted the ad. Viewers target themselves by
self-profiling and their personal details never leave the STB. Hence total confidentiality is maintained which improves
the likelihood that the consumer will trust the vendor and make a purchase - aggressive sales techniques automatically
fail when the viewer remains in control of all his personal data. The PBR technology and business models are patented
with further patent applications being progressed. Viewers receive both cash and vouchers on their mobile phones.
How PBR works
Customers acquiring PBR-enabled Set Top Boxes (STBs) will register details of their family at first set-up, so as to allow
them to earn rewards from watching ads. The typical reward will be 2p per minute, but voucher offers sent to a nomi-
nated smart phone will enhance that cash value. Details registered will include family members by age and sex, first lan-
guage, post code, household income, ownership of such items as car, bicycle, pet, garden, estimated weekly grocery bill, and so on.
None of that information leaves the box, so neither PBH Ltd nor any of its clients ever have access to it. Instead, head-
ers are attached to all ads downloaded into the PBR-enabled STB,
which will by-pass homes that do not fit the advertiser’s target
market.
Customers view PBR ads by choice. They know that PBR ads will
not be offered unless they fit the stated household demographic
profile. Ads will be offered in 2 minute breaks by means of an on-
screen message, inviting viewers to pause what they are watching
in order to view one or more of the PBR ads. They can then re-
sume watching, knowing that another set of PBR ads will be of-
fered at intervals of roughly 15 minutes. Advertisers will be able
to specify if they want to limit the number of times any message is
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2. Playback Holdings Limited
viewed by a single household.
With the express consent of householders, Playback Holdings Ltd will be able to aggregate a large volume of viewing
data, which will have commercial value, especially as clients will in addition be able to target groups of households for
further inquiry, typically by sending a questionnaire to the specified mobile phone, and offering a reward for completing
the questionnaire.
How people watch TV
The Economist has reported (May 2010) that, in the UK, 90% of TV viewing is live TV viewing. Only after the viewer has
found that there is nothing worth watching on live TV does he switch to anything he may have recorded on his Personal
Video Recorder (PVR). This makes up just 7% of viewing. Only after seeing that he has nothing to watch on his live TV
and pre-recorded TV does the viewer switch to video on demand services such as BBC iPlayer etc. This makes up just 3%
of viewing.
The percentages may have changed since this Special Report with the growth in BBC iPlayer and other broadband deliv-
ery services but probably not by much. Connecting televisions to the internet is getting easier with Samsung SMART TV
and new Sony Bravia sets automatically locating WiFi connectivity in the home. But people buy new televisions infre-
quently and televisions which automatically configure themselves to connect to the internet tend to be expensive sets
which sell in low volumes.
In British homes with a Sky+ box, which allows for easy recording of programmes, almost 85% of television shows are
viewed at the time the broadcasters see fit to air them. Some 60% of all shows recorded on Sky+ boxes are viewed within
a day. Often the delay is only a few minutes—just enough to finish the washing up or to make a phone call.
The Economist Special Report also showed that on average people greatly underestimate the amount of television that
they watch per day and greatly overestimate the amount of pre-recorded and internet video that they watch. On average
in the UK everyone watches in excess of four hours television per day - in the US this is more like five hours television
per day.
There is a short 2010 video from The Economist on this topic available from a link on the PBR website.
Target Market
In the UK alone there around 27 million homes with television sets. Over 17 million of these are homes where Freeview
is the secondary television platform (i.e these are homes where the primary television service is being provided by satel-
lite or cable) and the remaining 10 million homes are where Freeview is their sole or primary television service. These
tend to be older viewers and poorer viewers.
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3. Playback Holdings Limited
The PBR service will initially be aimed at Freeview viewers
although there is no good reason why the 'homebrew kit' built
around the Raspberry Pi (see below) cannot be used on satellite
and cable too. After proving the model in the Freeview market-
place it is the intention to licence the technology for inclusion in
cable and satellite STBs, and YouView-style integrated televi-
sion sets. At this time we intend that PBR will become available
in legacy standard definition STBs as a middleware software
upgrade broadcast overnight. Discussions are ongoing with
various retailers for inclusion of PBR technology in various
commodity digital television STBs to be launched shortly.
The overall UK market for PBR is all digital TV sets, which are rapidly replacing the 60 million analogue sets. Even
50,000 homes, with very clear demographic profiles, will be attractive to advertisers wanting to avoid wastage, to pin-
point suitable recipients of vouchers, and to test new messages and products – perhaps comparing outcomes in different
groups of homes. In theory, there is no limit to the number of homes that could adopt PBR (and even acquire more than
one PBR unit per home so that different members of the household create different profiles regarding themselves and
hence see different advertisements e.g. adults and children seeing different advertisements in their bedrooms).
The STB under development
We are building the first Set Top Box (STB) on the Raspberry
Pi - the extraordinary single board computer from Cam-
bridge, UK. Stephen Glynn, our CTO, has one of the first
units in London and has been working on developing the
STB on it since late May 2012.
Currently at the time of writing there are about 50,000 Rasp-
berry Pi computers in the world. By the end of July 2012 this
is estimated to have risen to in excess of 100,000 and Eban
Upton of the Raspberry Pi foundation has said that he hopes
there will be around a million Raspberry Pi computers in
homes around the world by the end of this year (2012) when
PBR plans to launch their 'homebrew' kit.
Cloud Computing
Our cloud computing infrastructure is currently under development. Basically we divide this into two stages - Up-
stream and Downstream. Currently we are working on the Downstream stage.
The Downstream stage is engaged in taking a signal from the STB of a consumer, transmitting this across the web, man-
aging it within a cloud database, sending it to a mobile voucher system, generating a mobile voucher on the customer’s
mobile phone and providing all the back-office facilities. These facilities are currently under development by our CTO.
The Upstream stage involves building a demonstration STB upon which the viewer can profile himself, view television
programmes via PBR and earn money. We are going to be building this demonstrator as a custom written application to
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4. Playback Holdings Limited
run on the Raspberry Pi computer. Raspberry Pi computers will become generally
available later this year - it is thought that hundreds of thousands of them will be in
British homes by Christmas 2012. In this configuration the Raspberry Pi will be oper-
ated by a standard television remote control using CEC under HDMI (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI and see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBs7KaTK5Hk for a video of this in operation).
The aim then will be to raise further funding so that implementations of our technol-
ogy could be installed within existing Freeview PVR owners by means of an software upgrade, by licensing it to be de-
ployed on YouView and in the various satellite and cable STBs. But we will also be looking at getting young program-
mers interested in developing the technology on the Raspberry Pi and in a variety of educational and training business
models build around our expanded business.
Electronic Voucher and Delivery
The mechanism for electronic voucher and cash delivery to a mobile phone
that has been selected is well established in the UK. It is to be based around i-
movo technology - another patented British technology. i-movo's web site is at
www.i-movo.com, their processing centre is in Jersey and, in bullet form, their
key features are:
i-movo Secure Digital Voucher redemption capability available in 23,000 PayPoint stores across the UK
Every UK household in urban/suburban location within 1 mile of an outlet
Energy companies have used CashOut to pay out over £6M in the last twelve months to their "Pre-Paid"
customers
"Pre-Paid" customers are largely C2D and welcome these payouts (between £5 and £15) with over 80% of
payments claimed
Customer satisfaction with the service is 97%
Same service can be used for advertiser-sponsored vouchers where sampling (i.e. free product) redemp-
tion rates have reached 87%
Service totally proven with over 4M vouchers redeemed by over 600,000 customers since launch in 2006.
Further information
Contact Playback Holdings Ltd either via our website (www.playbackrewards.com) , e-mail me directly at
ali.kelman@playbackrewards.com or speak to me at the British Business Embassy at Lancaster House on 3rd August
2012 in London.
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5. Playback Holdings Limited
We are interested in a fast global rollout of our patented technology - and there
are many opportunities for a variety of international and national partners and
representatives both in financing the operation, inward investment in the UK and
in exclusive and licensing relationships. We look forward to hearing from you.
Alistair Kelman
CEO Playback Holdings Ltd - London UK
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