A recent flutter of rich media vendor announcements has left me and a lot of the industry largely underwhelmed.

Here's a quick play-by-play, followed by reasons why the rich media landscape is getting boring:

• Burst Media / PointRoll: an ad network can now serve rich media ad units from a specific vendor.
• YuMe / PointRoll: a video ad network can now serve rich media ad units from a specific vendor.
• DoubleClick / Gigya: DoubleClick can now widgetize its rich media banners. Sounds like the Clearspring / PointRoll announcement -- last December.
• Eyeblaster is busy IPOing.

So once upon a time, rich media was new. PointRoll was pioneering expandables, and Klipmart was making moves on the video front. Now rich media vendors have largely commoditized duplicated products.

The fact that they're now pursuing integration with video advertising is expected, and the fact that they're widgetizing their banners is only interesting to the extent that marketers and agencies can make creative that a user would even want to grab and share. In fact, in a paradigm where two clicks in a hundred are considered exemplary, what smaller fraction is going to want to save the ad and take it with them?

But all hope is not lost for rich media. In fact, there are four things that could bring sexy back to rich media, as well as some encouraging signs that it's already on its way to success.

Author notes: Julie Ruvolo is director of business development at DivX.