Charter, Cox, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Comcast and Bright House Networks have collaboratively been working on an advertising system dubbed "canoe" since 2008. The project was initially aimed at delivering different ads to different households depending on demographic data -- a data collection effort that even involved Comcast building a 500 terabyte data warehouse designed to store data on your viewing habits.

However, the targeted ad effort was shelved back in June after cable carriers struggled to make it actually work. Instead, the cable industry spent much of 2009 working on making ads more interactive, with the hopes of launching something tangible before the year's end. They've now pushed that effort back to Spring of 2010. Canoe's development cycle is starting to look somewhat like OCAP, a CableCARD replacement more than a decade in the making.

Of course, it's not like consumers actually care whether their cable company fails at implementing a system they don't want implemented anyway. Still, it's interesting how the cable industry suddenly suffers from the worst sort of incompetence any time they try to accomplish something in unison, be it Pivot (the cable industry's last wireless, quadruple play effort) or OCAP. It makes you start to wonder what exactly is going to happen to TV Everywhere, the cable industry's semi-unified attempt to stop cord cutters and embrace Internet video.