Cable operators care about ad revenues, as you might expect. What might surprise you is the amount of attention advertising gets when it represents a bit more than five percent of cable operator revenue.

 

Telephony revenues at the end of 2007 already had surpassed that revenue stream, representing at that point 6.8 percent of cable operator revenue. Cable modem service and related networking services represented more than 20 percent of total operator revenue, by way of comparison.

 

Also, since local advertising will represent just about 6.6 percent of total operator revenue by 2017, what appears as quite a lot of attention at the most-recent Cable Show might lead to some head scratching. The key might be that cable sees something coming in the multi-screen era that requires attention.

 

Motorola (News - Alert), for example, introduced a portfolio of advertising delivery technologies to offer targeted ads. Other providers with legacy businesses ranging from messaging (Frontporch) to real-time transaction support (Opennet) also were touting their value as advanced ad platforms as well.

 

Even switched digital video provider BigBand Networks (News - Alert) made a point of pointing out ways that the management and reporting software the platform uses can be used to improve ad targeting ability.

 

The point, it would seem, is that new cross-platform viewing and use of content will create new ad opportunities that, if nothing else, might be necessary to capture and extend cable's current value to advertisers, even if the overall returns might not be as large as from commercial services, consumer telephony or even broadband access services.

The unstated premise might be that if cable operators don't get their game into top form, they'll watch their share of advertising decrease in favor of other content providers such as Google (News - Alert) that already claim to offer highly-targeted advertising venues.