The current leader of the retail-advertising-via-plasma-television market (do we have a better name for this yet?) appears to be RippleTV, an El Segundo-based company that has over 1500 locations nationwide, with the largest concentration of displays located here in Los Angeles.

While they certainly have more of the local market than Danoo, a competing company I have previously written about, their choice of locations is just such that I haven’t run into them as often. Until they invaded my favorite coffee shop.

A couple weeks ago, I strolled into a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. After ordering my drink, I attempted to get on the wifi, which was previously a paid service through AT&T.

Except this time, it wasn’t. I opened my browser and was brought to a page that said my internet here would be totally free — all I had to do was go look at the RippleTV screen across the room, find the small number in the corner of it, return to my computer, and enter it into the browser. Only then would I be able to get online.

Genius? Annoying? Both, I think. I’m not a big fan of services that are free because they force you to do something else first that could earn them money, but then again, it wasn’t so bad. I just had to go look at a TV screen for a minute.

RippleTV seems to present a pretty good variety of news, events, and some targeted advertising. I haven’t spent a lot of time around one yet — just the hour or so I was at the coffee shop — but at first glance I did notice that the information seemed to be less targeted and precise as Danoo’s but more interesting, and with a prettier interface. I enjoyed glancing at RippleTV a lot more, but I can’t say with any certainty that it informed me of anything I might actually want to pay for.

But since I practically live in one of many Coffee Bean locations, they will get their chance.

According to their website, they have 180 locations in the Los Angeles area, with many other locations spread pretty nicely across the country. As I’ve been saying, it will be very interesting to see just how fast these types of services grow, as well as how useful to the public they are — and thus, how profitable the advertising segment will be for them.