Unicast's Video Commercial upgrade lets viewers use interactive features while video plays.

While marketers wait for interactive television to become a viable option, fully-interactive video advertising is coming to the Internet.

Just four months after debuting its Video Commercial unit, Unicast has announced a new version that allows unlimited interactive experiences to run during an advertiser's video ad. The original version of Unicast's product offered interactive elements only after the video played.

"The first version of the Video Commercial has enabled marketers to repurpose their TV assets and bring them online," says Allie Savarino, senior vice president of Unicast. "The new version takes it one step further, allowing marketers to really leverage their investments."

The product is set to debut in mid-June, with a host of leading agencies already developing campaigns to launch at that time. Savarino says the release of the enhanced product so soon after the original is in response to advertiser and agency demand.

"As they have been buying and successfully utilizing the original unit," Savarino says, "they have been asking us if we could now bridge and align the interactivity with the video, enabling for interaction during the video play."

Unicast introduced the original Video Commercial in January as a six-week beta program, in which five major advertisers bought 100 million impressions across 15 leading Web sites. Additionally, these advertisers contracted with Dynamic Logic to study the effectiveness of the campaigns. The results showed that, on average, the Video Commercial campaigns outperformed Dynamic Logic's Video/Audio MarketNorms®* by up to 59 percent and the Rich Media MarketNorms by five to 11 times. In addition, aggregated responses from almost 3,000 exposed consumers showed that the vast majority "felt like they were watching a TV commercial" and "found the ads entertaining."

The Video Commercial is a fully interactive, 2MB, 15 to 30-second ad unit, which plays pure digital video at a rate of 30 frames per second -- up to eight times faster than traditional broadband video. The Video Commercial is delivered via Unicast's patented, pre-cached (non-streaming) delivery method, so ads play perfectly/without delay for every consumer all of the time regardless of bandwidth, Internet connections or the Web site they are on.

Ads created in the new version will be viewable on all Web sites currently offering the Video Commercial, including ABCNews.com, About.com, AccuWeather, AtomFilms.com, BusinessWeek Online, Discovery iMedia, EA.com, ESPN.com, Forbes.com, FoxSports, iVillage, Lycos, MSN, SportsLine, and Tribune Interactive.