PayPal Commits to 'T-Commerce' Collaboration With Comcast and TiVo

7:00 AM PDT 6/12/2012 by Paul Bond

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On visits from his corporate superiors at Comcast

Tim Boyle/Getty Images

Initiatives will enable viewers to buy products they see advertised -- or donate to political campaigns -- with a few clicks of the remote.

PayPal on Tuesday will announce initiatives with TiVo and Comcast that will allow folks to instantly obtain digital discount coupons for advertised products or even purchase them on the spot.

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The TiVo initiative will roll out in the fall, hopefully in time for the November presidential election to enable viewers to easily donate to either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, assuming either or both of the campaigns embrace the new product for the myriad commercials they're expected to run.

There's no timeline for the Comcast initiative.

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Scott Dunlap, PayPal’s vp emerging opportunities and new ventures, will announce the “t-commerce” initiative at the opening of the TV of Tomorrow Show in San Francisco. In-house, they've been calling it PayPal TV, though the product, two years in the making, has no official proper name.

A PayPal poll in October indicated that 49 percent of TV subscribers are interested in purchasing goods and services directly from their televisions, and 89 percent of them are familiar with PayPal.

“All signs point to an industry that’s finally on the verge of taking a real foothold in consumers’ lives,” Dunlap will say in a blog post set to publish Tuesday.

When the interactive initiative goes live in the fall, Dunlap told The Hollywood Reporter, “you can literally hit ‘select’ and say how many of a product you’d like and we’ll send it to your default address on your PayPal account. With one or two clicks, you’ll have it at your house.”

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He wouldn't say, though, which advertisers have signed on to either the TiVo or Comcast initiative.

“The online and offline worlds have merged, and commerce now happens anytime and everywhere,” Dunlap’s blog post will say. “We believe the TV is the next natural outlet for commerce, and we’re excited to bring the innovation and security of PayPal’s payment solution to this new frontier.”

Email: paul.bond@thr.com