Swedish based LIMT (Local Insertion Media Technology) has developed a method to insert local commercial TV spots into national terrestrial and satellite based television transmissions. The company’s LVS 300 system uses leading edge MPEG2 digital communications technology to allow national and regional stations to split commercial air time among a number of advertisers. In this way they are able to increase advertising revenue while staying within existing concession constraints. 

Local TV advertising is already common in the United States made possible by the wide coverage of cable in the country. According to a report by the American National Association of Broadcasters, local TV advertising accounted for about 55% of the total in 1996.
”Concession constraints dictate how much air time can be devoted to TV commercials. Prime time viewing is often a bottleneck for TV stations, so a method with which to maximize income by meeting local commercial needs has long been sought after. With the LIMT system, different spots can be aired in different areas allowing operators to maximize advertising revenue. This without increasing commercial air time at all”, says LIMT’s newly appointed president and former European Tele-communications Marketing Manager of IBM, Pierre Strasser.
The first operational LIMT 300 system came on air in Sweden last autumn giving a dramatic increase in advertising revenue. The system is said to be profitable even on small viewer bases of 3,000 households.
”The increasing number of commercially financed TV channels means that advertising revenue will shrink as more players vie for a slice of the TV advertising cake”, says Pierre Strasser. ”By adding local advertisers to the national line up, the problem can be alleviated.”
The LVS 300, which first came on the market six months ago, is already in operation throughout the Nordic region. Installations are also running in Belgium, Spain, Italy and Austria as well as Australia and Korea.
The system is in essence a local video server which is either mounted on a terrestrial TV mast or in the cable networks’ headends. The standard system provides 2 hours of air time or 200 local spots. Ten or twenty-fold expansion of the system is possible. Video spots are pre-transmitted and stored on a local hard disk with the start signal imbedded into the video stream.

For further information contact:
LIMT AB, Local Insertion Media Technology
Göran Waerner
Tel.: +46 8 717 15 02 Mobile: +46 70 768 88 15
Fax: +46 8 717 25 02