FrameChannel Pushing Out More Ads to Digital Frames

Written on Nov 4, 2008 by Brian and filed under FrameChannel, News

FrameChannel is often the free service bundled with Internet-enabled digital picture frames to display free content like news stories, stock quotes and the like. While it’s free, we’ve never been very big on the service because the management interface is not very good and it laced with advertisements. It appears that the advertisements may be picking up as FrameChannel tries to leverage the “4th screen” in your home.

FrameChannel put out a press release today touting the ads and the Snapple channel. They go on to talk about the wireless digital frame as a new way to interact with consumers at home and the office.

Marc Simons, Manager at Initiative Innovations said, “In the sandbox of emerging media, FrameChannel shows immense promise. Wireless digital picture frames will continue to be a hot holiday gift item, and we’ll start to see explosive growth as prices come down and the technology advances. Frame Media is pioneering this space and we are excited to be participating in the development of this medium.”

Of course the release doesn’t talk much about the content or the service as it relates to the end users, other than the goal of subjecting us all to more advertisements. The problem is, the service just isn’t that good and even though it’s free, on the frames we’ve tested that come with a FrameChannel account, we don’t use the service.

Ultimately what’s more useful is a frame that can double as a secondary monitor for your computer, so at least you can have more control over what gets displayed, and there’s more functionality. FrameChannel will find a home on many frames, we just continue to want and expect more out of them.