Slashdot Mirror
PVRs and Advertisers' Worries
Jurisenpai writes "Today's NYT has an article on the conflicts between PVRs and advertisers, mentioning the recent Sonicblue case, as well as Tivo and ReplayTV."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
"We've trained people that you can buy things at 3 in the morning in the nude on the Internet and make a call to anyone from anywhere on a cellphone, and the idea that CBS is going to determine when I watch `CSI' flies in the face of that trend," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "TV networks are going to have to figure out how to make money from a TV viewer that is not nailed to the chair waiting for the commercial to end."
Amen to that!
'ARRGH! Pirate Designers of the Internet, we be!'
Then they should have been bothered for years by such commercial-killers like the toilet or refrigerator. People have been using those for years to skip commercials.
Personally, I channel-surf when commercials are run during a favorite show.
I am the evil aardvark!
Don't panic. The sun may come up tomorrow.
The advertising world is rapidly approaching the point when they are going to have to realize that TV ads are not >>nearly as effective as they thought they were. The reason people think (or rather know) that banner ads are ineffective is because you can measure it. There's no such technology for TV ads but between people getting up to pee, fast forwarding their VCR's or just tuning out in general -- I submit that they are grossly ineffective (especially for the price paid). An entire industry (Neilson, Ad agencies, the networks) has sprung up to propagate this lie, but that doesn't make it anymore true.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
With commercial skippers and channel surfers being thieves and all that, violating their contracts with the networks....
Gee, and I thought that paying for cable in the first place was meant to eliminate the need for commercial spots.
is it possible for there to be any kind of media without advertising?
I received my latest National Geographic magazine yesterday, and immediately went for the map included with that issue. It's a beautiful map of Mt. Everest and the various expeditions that have ascended that peak.
I flipped it over and saw a bloody ad for Ford taking up the entire poster. Instead of providing additional information about humanity's accomplishments in relation to the mountain, we get to hear about Ford's support of mountain climbing. I'm less than pleased with this.
Advertising is becoming so pervasive you can't do anything without seeing an ad. Watching a movie? Look for the product placement. Driving a car? Look for the billboards to roll by every quarter mile. I can't answer my phone any more because literally 90 percent of calls to my home are telemarketers.
When will it stop? When will we (consumers) be able to find something to do without being bombarded with advertising?
Commercials integrated into the shows. Basically, the commercials will be the shows. (as if they wern't already).
Right now the only ones that are whining are the CEO's and the other clueless wastes of space that like to make noise and get media attention.
... they cant)
at the sales front, advertising sales are down, why? BECAUSE THE ECONOMY SUCKS. and the CEO's who will be the first to be fired for sales dropping by the board are trying to point the focus of blame elsewhere. it's a simple Cover your Ass move, blame something out of your control.
In reality, companies buying advertising is still buying advertising, they aren't saying, "I dont want to buy TV spots as PVR owners will just skip them, I'll advertise in the newspaper instead" and they wont say it. It does not affect them, they do not lose money no matter what lies they try and create. (Make them show proof of 1 client that stopped advertising with them because of PVR's
basically, everyone needs to call these whiners on the carpet, make them prove it or shut up.
and the bottom line is they cant prove it because the impact is not real.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Do advertisters honestly believe that we sit enthralled by their crapulous offerings? Commercials are the point in a television show where I have the chance to take a leak or grab some cookies.
Hehhehe.. Record a commercial? I don't even do that now. that's what the "Pause" button is for.
either make them REALLY eye catching so i notice them when i fastforward over them(which works, cuz if i DO see an ad worth watching i slow down and take a look, and am still able to skip over the feminine itching ads)
:) that way you'd see them in normal time FFing over them... sux to be a normal TV veiwer hehe :)
or make them in slow-mo
In case you're not the 'free registering' type.
Use this account info:
Username: slashdottroll
Password: slashdottroll
should work, i just set it up...
it requires free registration
The television industry has known about DVR's for years, of course.
The music industry knew people were recording their music, and did nothing.
The advertising industry knew people were recording shows, and skipping ads when they recorded.
Both of them did nothing to stop it when they first knew about it, because the technology wasn't there to make it a threat. So they ignored the 20 pound weiner dog, and it became a 100 pount rottweiler. I just know they're going to try to punish everyone by either looking for legislation against the PVR industry.
Heaven forbid they recognise a potential threat and move against it (more effective in-show advertising, better targetted ads, etc), rather than wait until it becomes an almost unstoppable consumer movement that threatens their entire profit plan.
But how to make money off of syndication? When a show is in reruns the local station, or cable network, makes money by selling advertising. But if the ads are embedded in the show, how will the station make any money? Remembering that, without money they don't show the show. Will the backgrounds of the shots have to be digitally altered to sell new advertising? Or the foreground? Will we see Willow using a Mac on the first run, and a Dell in the rerun?
Best Slashdot Co
It is interesting to watch the knee jerk response that these recorders have caused in the advertising industry. The first impulse was to simply lobby to make them illegal. Now it seems advertisers are finally realizing that digital technology is going to let people personalize thier content. Just as the web has made advertisers struggle with placement, traditional TV commercials are probably long overdue for an overhaul. I just hope advertisers and TV execs don't make viewers suffer with some sort of pop-under ad equivelant on television. Who knows what the next wave will be, making you watch 2 minutes of commercials to get access to a TV feed? Personally I think television is a waste, there usually isn't much worth watching, and what is worth watching is usually available on DVD at some point. I have to admit though, if I could watch a 30 minute program without the 15+ minutes of commercials I might find it a more valuable investment of my time.
From NYT: (Text of article)
Digital successors to the VCR that eliminate the frustration of recording television programs have crossed a popularity threshold, raising alarm among advertisers and TV executives who see the devices as a threat to the economics of commercial television.
Digital video recorders, or DVR's, make it so easy to program and play back shows -- they do away with videotapes by storing 30 hours or more on a hard disk -- that their owners often choose to watch what is on the machine rather than what is on TV. Ignoring the networks' painstakingly planned schedules, they watch prime-time programs late at night and late-night programs before dinner, often oblivious to the channel on which it originally appeared.
Advertisement
They also see fewer than half the commercials they used to, compressing hourlong shows into 40 minutes as they fast-forward through the advertisements that the television industry has long depended on to pay for its programming and profits.
One in five people who own a DVR like TiVo or ReplayTV say they never watch any commercials, according to a recent survey from Memphis-based NextResearch.
Numbers like that have provoked gloomy pronouncements from industry executives. Some even come close to accusing habitual ad skippers of theft.
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
But such admonishments appear unlikely to sway DVR owners. By recording the shows they know they want to see, many say they have escaped the scourge of channel-surfing and the empty sense of wasted time so often associated with watching TV. Although sales of DVR's are still small compared with those of other home entertainment devices like DVD players, analysts say the remarkable enthusiasm they inspire makes their broad adoption only a matter of time.
"I can do e-mail and I can go on the Internet but I've never been able to program the VCR," said Kay Friedman, 66, of Morton Grove, Ill., a TiVo owner who takes special delight in waiting until 9:20 to watch "The Practice" on Sundays so she can skip through the commercials even as it records. "I'm hooked."
Dismissed until recently as too expensive and complex for the average consumer to set up, DVR's are now a fixture in more than a million United States households -- about 1 percent of the total -- a number expected to grow to 50 million over the next five years, according to Forrester Research. Fueling the growth are cable and satellite companies, who plan to build DVR features into their set-top boxes, greatly simplifying the set-up process. Cox Communications, Time Warner and Charter Communications have already announced plans to make these services available to consumers later this year.
TiVo, which markets its own DVR and licenses its service to others, costs $300 to $400, plus a $12.95 monthly fee. Sonicblue's ReplayTV 4000 costs $699 for 40 hours up to $1,999 for 320 hours of storage; the company said it expected sales to increase when it introduces a lower-priced machine later this year.
The television industry has known about DVR's for years, of course. But as the popularity of the digital technology begins to undermine many of the basic assumptions that have governed the television business for decades, broadcasters, cable programmers and advertisers are scrambling both to resist and to adapt to people who can rearrange schedules and skip commercials at the press of a button.
"You start losing marginal dollars when people who you thought you were buying are not viewing," said Daniel Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers. "This is not just a theoretical problem that might be happening somewhere down the line. This is happening now."
Some advertisers are re-evaluating their buying strategies and demanding new ways of measuring audiences. Steve Sternberg, director of audience analysis for the advertising firm Magna Global USA, circulated a memo recently that asked, "If an advertiser buys `NYPD Blue' on Tuesday night, and 10 percent of its audience watches it on Friday after midnight, should that audience be given equal value as the `live' prime- time audience?"
There is an important distinction, Mr. Sternberg said, between "zipping and zapping": "When people switch channels, they are going from something to something else. There are losses for one channel, but gains for another. With fast-forwarding there are only losses."
Others are trying to turn the technology to their advantage. Coca-Cola has paid for advertising that appears on the screen of a ReplayTV user when a viewer pauses a program for more than a few minutes. Last week, Best Buy announced that it would embed electronic tags visible only to TiVo users in 30-second commercials featuring the singer Sheryl Crow it is running on MTV. Viewers can click on an icon to see 12 additional minutes of the Best Buy "advertainment," while TiVo records the continuing MTV programming so they can watch it later.
"We need to start to understand how we're going to have to reach our consumers with this new technology," said Mollie Weston, a product manager for Best Buy's image advertising. "It is going to force us to put advertisements out there that people are actually going to choose to watch."
Indeed, advertisers take heart in data from TiVo that showed its viewers fast-forwarding through this year's Super Bowl and using the instant replay function for the Britney Spears Pepsi commercial more than any other segment besides the winning field goal.
Because DVR's are connected by a phone or high-speed Internet line from a viewer's home to a central server to get program schedules, some advertisers envision downloading commercials aimed at individual people based on information from databases compiled through other sources. Members of Purina pet clubs might get pet food commercials, for instance, while the owner of a BMW lease that is about to expire might get an advertisement on the automaker's new convertible.
"There's a lot of things that are going to start to change," said Ira Sussman, director of research for Initiative Media North America, an advertising buyer whose clients include Maybelline and Home Depot. "We're going to have to start thinking more about the importance of product placement within programs, placing more relevant, highly targeted messages. But we see it as a glass half full."
His research reflected a less rosy picture for the television networks, however. "We've found people recording programs and watching them on their own time are often not realizing what network they're coming from anymore," Mr. Sussman said. "That's a real brand equity that might be lost on the networks' part, if you're trying to put something next to `Friends' but no one's watching `Friends' live."
Much of the television industry's response to the new technology so far has focused on a lawsuit that seeks to ban the sale of the newest version of ReplayTV, which allows its customers to set it up to skip commercials on playback automatically, without even requiring them to fast-forward. The machine also allows its owners to send shows to each other over the Internet.
A group of media companies including Viacom Inc., the NBC television network, the Walt Disney Company, AOL Time Warner Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox has asked a federal court in Los Angeles to stop Sonicblue from selling the device, saying it contributes to copyright infringement. To win, they need to prove that the machine is fundamentally different from the VCR, whose distribution was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1984 after a similar challenge by the entertainment industry.
Lawyers for the companies now argue that the court's endorsement of consumers' right to "time shift" television programming in the 1984 case was based on the assumption that copyright holders would not suffer significant financial damage as a result. Over the protests of privacy advocates, they are demanding detailed information about which shows ReplayTV owners record and which commercials they skip.
Sonicblue's chief executive, Ken Potashner, concedes that on average ReplayTV users skip more than half the commercials. But he says it is up to the networks and advertisers to come up with creative ways to persuade viewers to watch. The ReplayTV machine records all the commercials, and users must choose to set it to skip them automatically on playback. They can always reset it if they choose.
"What are they going to attack next, the mute button?" Mr. Potashner said. "We've provided an efficiency improvement for a consumer who is compelled to skip a commercial. What they should do is work with us."
A victory in the companies' case against Sonicblue will not stave off the fundamental shift in culture undermining their business, industry analysts say. Consumers have embraced digital technology that allows them the greatest flexibility in the way they shop, communicate and consume all kinds of media -- and it is not likely to be different in TV.
"We've trained people that you can buy things at 3 in the morning in the nude on the Internet and make a call to anyone from anywhere on a cellphone, and the idea that CBS is going to determine when I watch `CSI' flies in the face of that trend," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "TV networks are going to have to figure out how to make money from a TV viewer that is not nailed to the chair waiting for the commercial to end."
If it is good enough, even dedicated DVR owners can still be tempted to watch live television, complete with its inconvenient interludes. Chad Little, a ReplayTV owner who started a Web site called Planetreplay.com, where viewers can trade with each other, regularly records about 10 shows, including "Junkyard Wars," and "Everybody Loves Raymond." Sometimes he makes an exception:
"Buffy," Mr. Little said, referring to the vampire slayer. "There's times I'll watch it straight through with commercials and everything."
If we were to take the RIAA stance on internet radio and why they cant make money in the new (and thrown out) payment scheme, and apply it to television advertizers, we would have to conclude that their jam down your throat approach, business model is a failure. New technology (which is fair use and patented [for whatever that is worth these days] renders their model useless. Like the riaa they are scared to death because they are 'old school' and dont know how to change with the times. I suppose they will try to ram thru a crappy bit of lawy saying its illegal to watch tv and bypass the adverts.
Perhaps the answer is for brodcasters to switch to a "sponsor" model, like NPR and PBS do.
Note that this is the model that CNBC is using with "Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser", and it seems to be working very well for them.
John
The drops of water don't know themselves to be a river; and yet the river flows.
They've had advertising on the inside covers and back cover for approximately 40+ years.
Did you just wake up after a long sleep, Mr. Van Winkle?
He does have a point. A large amount of the funding of programmes comes from adverts. If advertisers don't use it any more because they're not seeing a return on costs then they won't bother.
Here in the UK we pay a shade over 100 pounds ($150) a year to have a couple of advert free TV channels and a number of advert free radio stations. Yes, they still push out rubbish, but our rubbish is still of a higher quality than elsewhere in the world.
It is worth noting though that it only works because everyone is forced to pay this by law if they own a TV set.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
They also see fewer than half the commercials they used to, compressing hourlong shows into 40 minutes
That's right. One-third of network television's airtime is dedicated to advertising. And they're wondering why people are getting fed-up with commercials. It seems to be a rising trend as well.
I used to tape the Tick on Fox back when it was first run. The earlier seasons had approximately one more minute of programming than later seasons.
Stop bombarding us already!
I am the evil aardvark!
We've had commercial skip on our analog vcr's for almost half a decade now, but they don't worry about them? Plus now that commercials are done with full stereo soundtracks and studios are removing their analog equipment for commercial scheduling most of the clues that these schemes use are going away anyways. Why is this really such a big concern for the advertisers. Now for the studios I understand as PVR's make the idea of prime time obsolete, but for my money I would think that not tying a popular program to a particular timeslot would make it even more popular eg I haven't watched dark angel since they moved it to Fridays because I always go out with my wife to dance clubs and the like on Fridays.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Then the people who put out TV shows will have to resort to product placements within shows to make sure that we are all brainwashed into buying products. Then nothing can stop their evil plans!
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
There's lots of ways to fix this:
* Ads that are *INTERESTING*. I watch those on my TiVo. I skip the boring ones.
* A *VARIETY* of ads. Even I get bored watching the same ad the upteenth time in half an hour. Penalties for those who show the exact same ad twice in one commercial break.
* Pay-Per-Show. Let people buy shows without ads. Problem solved. If I want to watch x with ads, then make it so I have to watch the ads. If I don't want to watch it with ads, I'll buy it.
TiVo, ReplayTV, etc are not the problem. It's the archaic business model. If you require ads to be seen in this technological age, and lots of people have the technology to skip it, well, it's time to rethink the way you do business. Make people pay for shows is one solution. The shows I watch tend to get cancelled all the time (the only TV show I watch that I can count on running it's full length is Enterprise). Other than news, and the occasional movie, I only watch *5* (yes 5) hours of TV programming regularly. If I could pay for the shows that were cancelled, I could set my TiVo up to record them at any inane hour of the day (3:30 AM? why not?). Especially since it'll be commercial free.
Of course, the entire TV industry would be turned upside down now that ratings don't really matter - just making money from the show.
- Especially bitter because of the number of shows he watched has been cancelled or will be cancelled. Heck, the way the TV stations and studios are going, I might not even need a TiVo or TV anymore - there would be *NOTHING* interesting on for me to watch.
If I read the article correctly, out of 1 million users (not that many compared to the total number of television users) only 1 in 5 skips through commercials? I use winDVR and almost never use the time shift feature, I'm just plain lazy, or I usually get up and do something else while commercials are showing. I use my DVR just like a VCR, I like the fact I don't need VHS tapes to record shows and the quality of the recording stays intact over time. The point the advertisers seem to be making is that everyone skips through commercials. According to the numbers, this seems hardly the case. I do skip through commercials when I watch a show I recorded when I was out, but I would do this on a VCR recording also (which the Supreme Court has already upheld as legal). I feel that if 4 out of 5 users are not skipping through the commercials, I don't see it as a growing problem for advertisers.
Bill, can you factor this prime number for me?
To bring this video to the box of (just about) every tivo user, Tivo buys time on Discovery Channel around 4:00am. They broadcast the video in the clear and have Tivo record it, but hide it from the list of recorded programs. The trigger to display the icon indicating extra available material is broadcast on a not often used (and masked by the Tivo) secondary closed captioning stream. Tivo intercepts this and acts accordingly.
Unfortunately, Tivo also adds an extra icon and menu item on the main menu, advertising the availability of (and giving you a direct link to) the videos. This isn't the first time this has happened -- Tivo "teamed" with BMW a few months back to do a similar promotion. There is a big debate going on in the Tivo Community Forums on if this is acceptable to Tivo users (who are already paying $13/mo for the service).
Digital successors to the VCR that eliminate the frustration of recording television programs have crossed a popularity threshold, raising alarm among advertisers and TV executives who see the devices as a threat to the economics of commercial television.
the times they are a changin boys. get used to it. brick and mortar stores learned to augment their sales online, now it's time for you to get with the times and learn how to supplement with the pvrs. Use product placement instead. God knows we see enough of it now.
You're not going to hold it back. we all know that. I'm planning on buying a PVR as soon as possible... i never thought i would, but then my boyfriend gave me a dvd player for christmas. It's easier, more convenient, and fun than a VCR, and i'm betting PVRs are even better. i'm hooked on digital TV and now i want it all. ALL DAMN YOU!
Numbers like that have provoked gloomy pronouncements from industry executives. Some even come close to accusing habitual ad skippers of theft.
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
Ok, this one pisses me off. So the $50 i pay a month for my satellite TV service is a gift from santa claus? how about the $5 i spend every time i want to watch a pay per view movie? or the $40 when my boyfriend wants to watch one of those silly wrestling specials? And don't get me started on the prices for pr0n!
TV has never been free for consumers. we pay for it, and we pay big. It might not look like a lot to someone who's making a six figure salary to bluster and spread FUD to the media, but to John Q. Public, $50 a month is a lot of money. Multiply that by the number of cable viewers in the country, and you get a nice fat number. I'm not sure how its all divvied up in the end, nor do i really care... if network exec salaries and stars getting $1 million a show are any indication, things aren't dire yet. (i realise not everyone pays that much for cable, and some pay more.. i'm just going by what i personally pay).
And FYI: I've seldom actually watched a commercial since i was 12. the only ones i'll actually stay still for now are those funny blockbuster ones with the guinea pig and the rabbit.. those i love. So maybe you can take a clue from that? If you made commercials entertaining instead of annoying and loud, perhaps more people would watch them.
Speaking of loud, that's another thing that pisses me off. Is it just me or have commercials gotten even LOUDER? I know they intentionally raise the volume a few knotches during commercials to get your attention, but it's at the point where as soon as the program cuts to commercial, i automatically hit 'mute'. Here's another hint: LOUDER ISN'T BETTER!
And that's my rant for today, May 23, 2002.
claudia
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
TV and radio advertising were based on 'sponsorship', not ads. Instead of a 22 minute show bookended and broken up by commercials, we had the "Alka-Seltzer Variety Hour" brought to you by "Alka-Seltzer" with the fizz that says "relief".
We'll probably be back where we started with similar sorts of corporate sponsorship in a few years. I don't really think it would be so bad, mostly I just flip channels during commercial breaks anyway looking for cooler commercials to watch than the ones paying for the show I'm watching.
Remember, in our universe, "Annoyance" is a conserved quantity - those wishing to advertise will certainly find ways to do so.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
There's a simple solution to all of this. Just stop admitting to these marketing bozos that you fast forward through the commercials! What's the joy in admitting on some survey that you don't watch commercials? Don't give the networks any statistics that will justify going after DVR's.
I've discovered these three talents from commercials. Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" was on the VW Cabriolet commercial. Devo's "It's A Beautiful World" was on a Target ad. Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" was some car commercial. The radio stations around here suck and I never really got into trading MP3s. After getting the CDs from the Record Exchange, I learned that: the chick at the counter *really* likes Nick Drake; that Target ad is the ultimage irony about the "world we live in"; and some car company is using the same song that was on the "Trainspotting" soundtrack. Anyway, I'm just saying that I WILL PAY ATTENTION to commercials... if and only if they're well done. Think about it in these terms -- Carrot-Top: Delete; the Dell Guy: Delete; the Florida Orange Juice commercial with people dancing to a Brady Bunch song: SAVE. You know, advertisers should realise that with PVR and broadband, people will *share* their favorite commercials.
simon adkins
Broadcasters will have to be more creative in placing ads. You already see this on the cable news stations with overlay and sidebar ads. ITs too easy to zap serial ads. You'll have to pay a premium for ad-free channels, just as you have to on the InterNet.
Channel hopping is not zero sum - often the hopper will browse around the channels for the duration of the adverts to hop back to the original channel, having seen no adverts.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I wonder how much audio advertising a fetus is subjected to before it's born...
Personally, I'm still waiting for advertising on toilet paper and paper towels in public restrooms.
-----
Can't afford Apple's nifty hardware? How about a raffle ticket?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Read "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl.
Written in 1952, about a world where advertising is king.
If I were pessimistic about what the advertisers think their rights regarding commercials are, this book would be very prophetic.
sine puella vita suget
Damn you
my plan to build up sales for the new fluffy(tm) toilet paper by putting slogans on gas station loo rolls like "bet ya wish this loo paper was fluffy(tm)" has now been suggested to the whole of slashdot!
I bet someone else gets there first now
Shouldn't the burden fall on the networks in this situation? As a viewer, I have not in any way signed a contract to view commercials. If a commercial is interesting, I will view it. The disturbing prevailing thought of the day is to give the content providers control over the mediums. Mp3 players, PVR's, where does control stop? Same logic behind Sony attempting to enforce digital music "security" in devices--leveraging their weight as a media content provider to "strongly encourage" security technology to prevent playing certain music. By having citizens nodding their heads saying "gee, it sounds fair to me--they should be compensated" means that media corporations already have a strong foothold and have warped the minds of many. Never mind the enormous privacy concerns--media companies seeking to obtain demographics forcefully.
You'd think that advertisers would get a clue.
Before I bought my Tivo, I was taping shows. I fast forwarded through commercials then too. Nothing has changed in that regard for most people.
If a commercial catches my eye while I'm fast-forwarding, I'll actually go back and watch it (usually if it has sufficient babe-content).
I think that the music and television industry's current "Greed Fest" is going to come back and bite them in the ass.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
How these Digital PVR's are worse than the 30-second skip button the the remote control for my VCR?
Anyone? Anyone?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Yes - it's the BBC. For those who might not know, there are no adverts on the BBC. We pay a 'license fee' (euphamism for a tax levy). This fee then goes towards paying for the BBC. In addition, the BBC also has some merchandising and sells off programmes to foreign stations.
But then you know that. It always raises a giggle from me when I'm in the US and I see PBS saying "it's only with your donations that we're able to bring you quality programming like the Teletubbies". Really? Leaving aside whether you believe Teletubbies to be quality (I do, for it's target audience), I could have sworn that the real reason it exists is because of my UK taxes going towards it...
So there's your answer. Directly funded TV is possible, and does exist. Just not in the US as far as I'm aware.
Cheers,
Ian
Those are some lovely parting gifts. Trolls are so giving, and the CLIT is so very lovable!
The GPL makes software more like your mom. Free and open to all.
The trick will be to make skipping commercials not worth the hassle.
For example, the screen will dim, and the viewer, expecting a commercial skips forward. Then sneakily, the screen returns to the show, revealing an earth shattering twist in the plot.
OR
With HDTV on the horizon, networks could always stick to their 'boxed TV style', and use the sides of the TV (its extra wide, remember) to display advertisements _while_ the show is airing.
Then there would be no interuptions ever, and the ads couldn't be avoided.
Okay, I'll admit it... I can't stand football, but I watched the Superbowl for the commercials! Why? Because they're interesting and (mostly) sorta clever.
On the other hand, would tons and tons of "intersting" commercials really keep my attention? Doubtful. I don't even remember which commercials I liked from the superbowl, let alone what they were advertising.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
Good. I want this. I'd gladly pay for the channels I watch. Then I'd only get the 10-15 channels I actually want, rather than the 100 or so I have to pay for to get the ones I want. The Beeb sustains 6 channels and umpteen radio stations on $9/month license fee. I'd gladly pay another £2-3/month for each channel I actually want, rather than the £35/month I pay now for what is mainly crap.
Max Headroom Died for Your Sins.
After all, ads simply cheapen the model for the end viewer.
Television won't go away, but at the end of the day, commercials just make it cheaper, but charging $.25 for each show would make the networks rich as hell. So either way, commercials will be here, and so will pay TV.
There just needs to be a way to pay for your TV and have no commercials, but that won't happen either, because ads are so pervasive.
Even if you pay for a magazine or television with almost complete exclusivity for commercials, then they will still attempt to slip a few in, BECAUSE THE TEMPTATION IS THERE TO TURN A FEW EXTRA BUCKS because now it is more of a tempting target. Cosmo or something similar? You pay $5 an issue and it is ALL ADVERTISING.
Strangely, I have noticed mostly men complaining about the commercials, although that is defenitely not a hard and fast rule. It just appears that women like to kind of shop in their heads when they are watching... after all, not to stereotype, but most women that aren't totally into compiling or racing cars seem to like shopping.
The best thing to do is tape or Tivo it out, but if that doesn't work, then learn to totally ignore it. I work in TV, and the advertising force is the same size as the production force. I guess no one should be surprised by this.
Did they ever stop to realize that maybe they're not even an industry worth having? Flawed business model perhaps?
Examine the evidence:
#1 Inability to prove that people actually are paying attention, or that they can influence spending in a significant way. Even if they can, are they being manipulative in an unethical way?
#2 Advertising pollution becoming increasingly intrusive, even for products that are directly paid for by the consumer. Can't drive down the road without seeing billboards, watch a movie, even in a theatre. On and on and on...
#3 They use money that might actually be used in more worthwhile ways by companies. Such as increased production, better employee benefits, R&D, planning for consequences... hell, you guys probably have a better idea than I do where the $$$ could go, including places that benefit consumers, employees AND shareholders.
#4 The difficulty of drawing the line between advertising and fraudulent claims. Before you boo and hiss, are Miss Cleo's commercials on tv at 2am valid advertising? How low does she have to go before it isn't? How many in the past have sunk that low?
#5 Existence of products that were market hits even without much of an ad campaign. Word of mouth and quality were good enough, and the product filled a real need (instead of trying to invent a dubious one).
#6 The ability of advertisers to steal people's valuable time from them, even when they haven't expressly or implicitly agreed to give such time (unlike watching TV). Well maybe the ability isn't the bad thing, but their willingness to exploit such an ability is unbounded. Only fear of law and PR backlash keeps them in check, and then not always.
Again, do we need this industry? If it disappears off the face of the earth, will we be so much poorer? The workers will adapt, find new employment, and our country would be stronger. And even if they don't deserve it, maybe a few idiots would get scammed less often.
Frankly, after reading the article, I'm pretty worried that they may just legislate these things out of existence.
So I bought one now, while I still can.
Way to go, TV Execs!
goats.com: better than
when you had like one or two big sponsors? My father (who is in his 70's) use to say that when he was a kid, they had great radio programs that had interesting stories. Each program had one big sponsor, and they paid big bucks for it (i.e Ovaltine). The only commercials you would hear were from that sponsor. Sometimes, they even had show hosts doing live commercials. When TV first came to be, they did they tried to do the same thing. If they still did that for television, that would be great.
But I am dreaming. Let's face it, everyone and their mothers needs to dip into the honeypot. You need to allocate commercial time on the national level, then allocate time on the regional level, until there are dozens of sponsors that hog all the time.
TV exec's are insane!! Who want's to see 20 minutes worth of commercial in an hour time slot???? Gimme a break!
Coderz 4 Life
In Japan, many fast food establishments don't provide napkins. Instead, you can get napkins handed to you for free by people on the street. The napkins are free, because they contain advertising.
Not quite what you were saying, but they're getting closer. Hell, one time I was on a flight and my peanut bag contained an advertisement for a clothing company.
For more information, click here.
Blipverts are the answer! Until some fatass explodes.
I made this post before in a related story, but I thought I'd bring it back up.
VCRs that automatically skip commercials have been on the market for years. I would guess they use the exact same system of commercial marking as a PVR would, yet there has been no whining or accusations over these!
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
I almost never watched ads even before DVR - a paperback book on the sofa solved the problem quite neatly (in the UK, ads are generally grouped into large chunks not scattered quite as liberally as in the US).
More to the point, on the rare occasions I actually noticed an ad it was usually because it was so stupid/banal/irritating that I vowed never to use that product again. There is one brand of breakfast cerial I haven't touched for 35 years because their jingle annoyed me so much. I can't remember ever buying anything as a result of TV advertising.
And, since no show can attract enough conventional ad dollars, no show goes into reruns.
Best Slashdot Co
Bottom Line: this is about control, not where the money comes from.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Does anyone know how Tivo and SonicBlue get the master TV programming schedules from the networks? NOTE: I'm not asking how *my* Tivo gets the schedule from Tivo central, but how Tivo central gets them from the TV networks. Are they sent out from the networks electronically using standard protocols as soon as the schedule is set or do the Tivo guys go out and buy the TV Guide every week and type 'em all in by hand? For that matter how does TV Guide get them?
The reason I ask is that it seems to me that TV schedules function in an analagous fashion with DNS and IP addresses for web sites. Namely, if my Tivo doesn't know when the Simpsons is on, it can't record it for me. Is there any possibility the networks could try to sabotage PVRs by restricting access to their schedules?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Make ads work with PVR You really don't want this, if you think about how abusive pop-under ads and hideous flashing x20 pr0n-cam ads are. Imagine JavaScript/VBScript TV, running along with all your other content, only your PVR sees it and throws crap all over the screen in front of your shows and you have to kill them or wait for them to time-out until you can go on.
To make advertising work, they'll have to experiment with variable length ads (so obvious no-one ever thought of it, surprised?), you get a 23 second ad, a 37 second ad, etc., also placement in shows (which is where radio and TV once were), make advertising in such a way you don't know your really watching an ad (i.e. pretty much any saturday morning cartoon, it's a plug for toys.)
I wouldn't want them farking around with PVRs to make the ad content carried and processed by it, but you know money talks, and even TiVo may be listening.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The solution is simple: If you want people to watch the ads, make ads worth watching. When an ad is interesting or funny, I will go back and watch it a second time with my TiVo's replay feature. When it insults my intelligence or is otherwise annoying, I skip it.
Good ads are out there, you know. If they weren't, AdCritic would still be operational. Instead, it was a victim of its own success, so popular that the guys who ran it couldn't afford the bandwidth bills and had to cease operations [yes, I know it will be reborn soon, but probably in a form inferior to the original]. Though why they didn't try to get a 5 or 10 cent payment from advertisers per viewing/downloading of the ads they hosted is beyond me-- people were willing to sit and wait for a COMMERCIAL to download, for the specific purpose of WATCHING the thing-- probably more than once-- for God's sake.
~Philly
1) Make ads worth watching. I'll stop and watch an ad if it's funny or intelligent or otherwise better than the drek that is most advertising. Entertain me, don't recycle that Tremclad ad from 5 years ago, or the Bites 'n' Bites one from 20 years ago.
... At some point they are going to either a) run out of space to advertise, at which point our cities are going to be so saturated that ads become part of the landscape and people tune them out, or b) hit a point where there is a huge public backlash and they are forced to admit that what they are doing is wasteful and intrusive.
2) Give up on the 30 second spot. If PVRs come with built in 30-sec FFWD buttons, stop making ads 30 seconds long. Sure, people will still zap through the ads, then back up to catch the bit of the show they missed, but they might see something interesting along the way and stop to look. (Although it probably messes up the entire pricing structure of the ad industry, I bet the creatives would have a field day being let out of the 30 second constraint).
3) Run ads in parallel with the shows. Like those tickers on CNN or MSNBC, just shrink the show picture down a little bit, and run thin ads along the bottom of the screen. Heck, they already do this during the credits of most shows (although, the day they decide to do this to the *entire* show is the day I stop watching that channel).
4) Give up. PVRs aren't giving the consumer anything new in terms of commercial skipping. When I taped shows on my VCR, I ffwded through the commercials. Before I had a VCR, I used the commercial time to take a leak or refill my drink. As someone already posted, the value of tv commercials to advertisers is immeasurable, ridiculously over-stated, and perpetrated by the networks, ratings agencies, etc..
Commercials (and advertising in general I would venture to say) are becoming so predominant that the average citizen has tuned them out. Do you remember what the ad was on your bus stop this morning? I don't. Advertisers think the solution to this is to find new and unexpected places to put their ads: taxi cab hubcaps, entire cars, sides of trucks that drive around with no purpose but to show ads (and pollute, of course), toilets, steps in the subway, public garbage cans
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Not to get too into the moment... I have lots of distractions in life.. TV being one that I could do without. My cable company just upped the cost of watching TV by 8%. They did the same to my broad-band Internet connection. Next month they say I've been put on a new package which costs less... hmmm.. it's summer.. get out of the house or sit and LAN party. Dump cable and let them know as a consumer that they should wake up and change for us... we pay their company to live.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
This whole thing could be averted if advertisers would get with the program and start making blipverts. Everybody wins (with a few exceptions).
Advertiising firms employ a bunch of people who could be making more X. Since less X gets made, volume is lower, prices rise to fill in the profit margin. Not to mention the huge outlay of $$$ for marketing that could also be rolled into profit, R&D, etc.
Maybe 50 years ago, getting info about your needed products to consumers was a problem, but not now. If the customer even has an inkling they need it, finding it themselves is easy. If they don't need it, then you're just diverting money away from other businesses that might use it for better things.
Advertising is a dinosaur, huddling in the jungle wondering when all the little meteorites will stop.. never thinking that a big one is on the way.
Well, there is one way, but let's hope they never ever implement this: banner ads. Yes, they could do what cnn does and make the actual video program only take up 1/4 of the screen and make the rest advertising space. Won't be able to ignore that...
today is spelling optional day.
While Joe Sixpack (to whom I am superior) might like watching his Budweiser ads, I feel that television advertising has absolutely no effect on me.
This may surprise you, but this statement is contradicting itself. By naming a specific brand, you are proving that television does have an effect on you.
The primary purpose of TV advertising is to create brand awareness - in other words, to let you know that a product exists, and to cause you to remember it. The mere fact that you mention a brand name in your sentence means that not only did the TV ad have an effect, it had it's intended effect.
The previous poster's comment about banner ads shows that he (and the people selling the banner ads) doesn't understand what most advertising is supposed to do - it's not supposed to make you stop everything you're doing and buy the product, it's supposed to let you know that the product exists (although there are exceptions to this rule.)
This is why banner ads are "failing" - they're not ineffective, it's how they're measured that's flawed. (Now, this is orthogonal as to whether people pay attention to them or not - which is a better measure of whether advertising is effective or not - if nobody's paying attention to them, then they're failing... but this isn't the same as the number of people who click on them.)
Unless our government is full of idiots or media cronies (and it is, unfortunately), then here's how I see this "problem" shaking out:
The "entertainment" industry, which has been bloated with crap and getting fatter and fatter every year as wannabes climb over each other to get something published, will stop making so much money indiscriminately. The cash cow of advertising, now getting old and sick, will die off, and "free" TV will disappear. (I have not had "free" TV since 1989, when I first signed myself up for cable.)
The money in TV will shift from the producers of shows to the companies that deliver those shows--the makers of the DVRs and the suppliers of the DVR services. These companies, in order to keep profits high and unable to make fortunes on advertising, will charge consumers for their services, and they will use that money to fund programs that consumers will actually watch.
These services will license their most popular programs to the other vendors, and those vendors will probably charge premiums (pay-per-record, premium fees for non-native shows, etc.) for them to their clients.
In this way, the services will compete on overall quality of ALL their content--they won't have 18 hours to fill with crap every day, so they won't have the burden of those costs.
This is a Very Good Thing because it actually democratizes the content industry. Independent producers will be able to produce and license their shows to the DVR service companies. Big studios will still produce and license content, but they won't have the overhead of providing all the crap they do now.
All this assumes that Congress and our courts manage to keep their heads out of their arses and don't play lackey to the Chicken Little studios.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
I get very few calls anymore on the phone because I spent the last year religously telling every telemarketer to put me on their do-not-call list.
... it was an automated call wanting me to press 1... I wish I had answered it, if only to find out who called to tell them to get me off the list.
Did the same with snail mail, and the model hasn't perfected itself for email, so I simply run my email through spamcop.net, and I'm happy.
I did get a telemarketer call the other day though that reached the answering machine
I'm already working on software for my tivo that will kill most ads, no matter what tricks they use. It md5s the first frame of all ads, and adds this to a database that contains how long the ad is, so that it can blank it out whenever it sees it.
Still needs me to hit the "adkiller" button, but I'll only see it once, and then only part of it. If I get it working, may have to let others use the db...
Nope, it's just to fatten the wallets of cable providers and networks. Reminds me of how public servants (i.e. elected officials) sold half the country on lotteries to fund schools then just stole the additional money from the schools that the lottery generated (at least some people have finally caught on and forced lottery money to be in addition to) if they ever thought about it, they probably forgot it as soon as one of them pointed out they could charge both subscribers and advertisers and make lots of money. It's the american way.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have two TiVos because networks like to pit their top shows against each other. I never watch commercials on either TiVo. I do watch commercials in those shows that are simulcast in HDTV, because TiVo doesn't make an HDTV recorder yet.
If the networks want to keep their advertising revenue, finish switching all the shows over to HDTV.
How many TV shows do you watch in reruns, that you would otherwise have to buy the DVD's for? How long did they run? Even if the disks sell for $4 apiece, how many disks to hold an entire season? Given what the season one set cost, the entire run of Buffy will probably cost $200. X-files around $400. B5 for $200. Soon you're spending thousands of dollars for something which used to be effectively free.
Best Slashdot Co
I don't understand this 'Free TV' Concept. Where I live you need cable in order to get any type of decent reception. Maybe it's time for the broadcast networks to change their business model to the Slashdot one. Over the air is free, with no commercials, over cable could be a subscription, with no commercials. Cable and Sattelite providers could simply sell the major networks as a package, much like the premium packages they sell. There's no reason I can think of why this wouldn't be possible, and face it, since the best programming resides elsewhere, you could avoid them altogether.
I promise.
Yes, people can skip your commercials. Yes, people can rip CD's into MP3's. Yes, the internet lets them easily share them.
But how about instead of sitting there, complaining about how technology changes and how its destroying your business model, here's a crazy idea... why don't you change your model?
Has this world lost ALL sense of invention and creativity? Christ, give me a job if your that dumb. I can think of about 10 ways right now you could use PVR's to your advantage. Hell, this article even mentions a couple.
As a highly placed executive at a broadcast media company let me point out that what we really need is a way to keep the future from happening. We've adapted to the present, yet these futuremongers insist on changing the rules. It's simply irresponsible, how do they expect everything to stay the same when everything keeps changing? The present suits us just fine - Congress should mandate that the market adapt to us, not the other way around.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This message will doubtlessly spawn messages accusing the industry of lack of ability to change with advances in technology, and so forth along with the usual crapola about "it's our airwaves, dammit" [emphesis added]
... the fact that the broadcasters have used them with relative impunity for 70+ years doesn't change that, and pointing that fact out certainly isn't "crapola" by anyone's definition, except perhaps that of the broadcasters themselves.
How on earth is that "crapola?" They are public airwaves that the broadcaster's are using
It may win on some minor points, but it mostly just gives the broadcasters time to secure settlements with PVR companies and come up with alternate technologies and models.
Based on the demands of Hollywood and the recording industry to date, and the trends in Washington, how on earth can you justify a "don't worry, be happy" attitude like this? Those new technologies and models are likely to incorporate the worst in big brother activity monitoring (perhaps even two way samplers?) and certainly draconian copyright controls, if those industries have their druthers (and it looks like they very well might). In the context of what has been happening a "don't worry, be happy" attitude is absolutey and completely unjustified. Indeed, it such an attitude is likely to insure that one of the more repressive scenerios is more likely to play out.
This mantra of don't get involved, don't worry, relax, be apathetic, go one with your life, nothing to see here, is exactly why we are in the mess we are in today. I really can't believe people were stupid enough to moderate that up to +5 insightful, except that some gullible people hear cynicism and mistake it for worldliness, intelligence, and even wisdom, when in fact it is none of those things, nor does it even imply any of those things.
Yes, the sun will come up tommorow. It rose and set perfectly on schedule over the killing fields of cambodia and the repressed millions in the old soviet block, and it will rise and set right on schedule over the western world, whether that world enjoys the freedoms of the past, or a future of authoritarian rule grounded in the enforcement of "intellectual property" in a society whose technology has long since made that notion incompatible with individual freedom.
If people follow your advice and do nothing, the latter becomes signficantly more likely.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The only ad that has been really good over the past few months was one that came before PBS' Frontier House. Georgia Pacific had one of their non-ad ads before the start of each episode:
[Voice over]
Life on the frontier would be very different if they had products like blah blah bathroom tissue
[shot of kid running into outhouse, sees 4 nasty looking rags on nails]
and blah blah paper towels
[picture of another nasty looking rag being used to clean dishes]
and blah blah plates and paper cups
[kid drinking from a pail about the size of his head]
Even though I had all of Frontier House on tivo, I still watched that ad each time. Well done GP!
claim that they're not influenced by advertising.
A few years ago, a cow-orker insisted that he was not at all influenced by advertising. He was a loyal football fan, and followed a Premiership club avidly - going to many home games and watching all Premiership football highlights on TV.
He owned a Sony Playstation, Drank Carling lager, and regularly ate at McDonalds.
And the three main sponsors of the FA Carling Premiership that year were....?
Tivo knows when and what you've fast forwarded and rewound?!?!?! Holy frickin' crap! Doesn't this bother Tivo owners just a little? Why would anyone own a Tivo? They're the AOL of DVR's!
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Usually, you're right -- but there are exceptions. For example, I usually only watch the superbowl to see the ads (sometimes I do care about the teams also). For some reason, ad makers haven't figured out yet that ads that are entertaining will make people _want_ to watch them. But aparently, they only put thought into their ads when they have to pay millions to show them.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
I would think that the next 'Big Thing' will be ads playing at the same time as the show. Kind of like on the news channels were they have the talking head in one window, short blurbs in another window, and a ticker along the bottom.
We can look forward to a large main window with the show playing, a second smaller window with ads running non -stop, and maybe text ads running along the bottom. Of course if this does happen, how long will it be before the show is in the small window, and the ad in the main window?
----
Adverts should make ads worth watching. Comon, who DIDN'T laugh at the E*Trade commerical during the Superbowl a couple years ago? It showed a monkey dancing while mentally handicapped people clapped. Then it cut to an image that said, 'we just wasted 2 million bucks'.
Even now, i'll watch a Britney ad, (albiet MUTED) for the sheer oogle factor.
--sig fault--
Networks need to provide better tailored advertising.
Every formerly-Turner station (TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi) has ads for some place called "Sonic". While it'd be great to get a Sonic-Freeze-Melt or whatever they're hawking these days, there are NO Sonic restaurants around here.
On a similar vein, there's also (mumble)wood insurance. Some guy in a cowboy hat is telling you about how cool their insurance is, and the ads finished by telling you there's a new office in Phoenix. PHOENIX?! On a nationally-televised ad? Nothing about AZ, but you'd think that would be better for local ads.
WTF do I want to sit through an ad that is targeted at less than 1/4 of their target market? What use is it? If it's because the rates are so cheap, someone tell Red Hat or SuSE. There's probably a higher percentage of viewers that know what Linux is versus wanting to see some nut selling inurance.
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting...
Free? I don't know about Jamie, but I pay $80/month for my TV. I'm damn well going to watch what I want.
TiVo rules...
Today, every college bowl game (in the US, anyways) has a corporate sponsor whose logo is spray-painted right on the fifty-yard line and whose brand is mentioned in the same sentence as the game at every announcement. Other stadiums do similar things by buying logo placement in places where the TV cameras usually watch.
Movies have been featuring product placement for years now, if not decades. TV shows have done the same thing to a lesser degree, probably only because the commercials are more profitable. That can and will change because of commercial-zapping technology, whether it's outlawed or not.
And then, of course, there are informercials -- TV shows which actually are commercials, wrapped up as talk show-type entertainment. And they work, astonishingly well. (Ever notice all those George Foreman grills in your local hardware, drug, and grocery store?) Any time you see a product with an "As Seen On TV" sticker, you can bet it's been using an informercial to justify its placement in that store.
Commercials will still continue to exist, of course. But as for "alternate" advertising methods -- you must not be watching with your eyes open to have not noticed them already.
If someone doesn't want to watch their friggin ad, they aren't going to watch their friggin ad!! What do they expect, some kind of Clockwork Orange setup with our heads clamped in a chair and our eyes pried open?? If people were once dolts who beleived anything they 'saw on tv' but have developed sales resistance over time, the advertisters just have to get over it and move on to something else. Wow, just because Joe pays Jim a bundle of bucks he's upset because Fred isn't watching the pitch? Like I said before, I personally find most adverts insulting, manipulative and devoid of any real information on which to base a purchase decision. It's a deteriorating relationship, the more hyper and deceptive they become, the less attention they get (from me anyway), and the less attention they get the more hyper and deceptive they try to become. How about an intelligent "our product is a good deal because.." instead of trying to jerk on our primal emotions and instincts?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I am also sooooo fed up with marketing efforts, I am starting to get really pissed. On the web we had banner ads. OK, I ignored them. Then came the pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-sideways. That's when I started using pop-up killers, junkbuster etc. Now I hardly see an ad.
On TV, I tune out during commercials. I change channels and when I can afford a TIVO, I'll buy one. Maybe I'll build a Linux box and record shows myself. Who knows. I will find way's to avoid commercials. Even if it means stop watching tv!!! Most of the stuff is pretty bad anyway.
Fuck the media companies. Calling me a thief if I skip a commercial. Fuckers! Any of you guys ever watch a kids channel? Are your kids whining they "need" this and that toy? Result of the continued assault from Disney and Co. I am fed up. Shit, I'll throw the fucking TV out right now.
Yes, the sun will come up tommorow. It rose and set perfectly on schedule over the killing fields of cambodia and the repressed millions in the old soviet block, and it will rise and set right on schedule over the western world, whether that world enjoys the freedoms of the past, or a future of authoritarian rule grounded in the enforcement of "intellectual property" in a society whose technology has long since made that notion incompatible with individual freedom.
Amen to that! You rock, FreeUser!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Nat Geo does have slightly higher quality printing than Mad.
Best Slashdot Co
[adjective] successors to the [product] that eliminate the frustration of [action accomplished by product] have crossed a popularity threshold, raising alarm among [group or groups of greedy, old, rich white men] who see the devices as a threat to the economics of [industry that refuses to change with the times].
I've got one!:
"Internal-combustion successors to the horse and buggy that eliminate the frustration of traveling moderate distances have crossed a popularity threshold, raising alarm among buggy whip manufacturers who see the devices as a threat to the economics of the entire horse-beating-implement industry."
Now you try!
~Philly
remember the resistance when theaters tried/started showing commercials?
what resistance. it was a big deal to see one coke commercial before a movie in 1994. Now you see at least 3 commercials before any movie around here, AND tickets are now 9$! True, I go to less movies, but I still go, and they probably get about the same amount of money from me per year.
Remember blip verts? The "a 30 second commercial compressed into about 2 seconds" concept from the pilot of Max Headroom?
Now, if they could only get around the couch potatos exploding...
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
The TV program in the movie paid for itself with product placement ads within the show.
Will life imitate art?
When will we (consumers) be able to find something to do without being bombarded with advertising?
When they're willing to pay the necessary price for the product. C'mon, do you really think Nat. Geographic costs only a few bucks a copy to produce? Advertisers are subsidizing the cost.
Even "public" tv and radio, supported by those who enjoy it, has to rely on sponsors to a limited degree. TV shows are largely, if not completely, free for the viewer. If I want them without the ads, I can always buy the boxed DVD when it comes out.
Billboards are a necessary evil if you want to drive on a freeway instead of a tollway. Magazine and newspaper ads keep costs down so that you can easily afford them. It's all part of the capitalist structure, in more ways than one.
And it's not all bad, you know. Advertising lets you know when a nearby store is having a big sale, or when a new restaurant opens nearby that you'd like to visit, or when your favorite musician is performing a concert in town. Most of advertising is drivel to you, but there's always somebody who feels it's useful to him or her. It's simply a fact of mass media that you have to digest everyone else's useful ads along with your own.
Don't like Ford advertising on your free posters? Go to the Nat. Geographic store or web site and buy your own, then. It's really that simple.
This may surprise you, but this statement is contradicting itself. By naming a specific brand, you are proving that television does have an effect on you.
... adults can be convinced of anything, given enough time. There was once a study done where an adult was convinced the sky was red through sheer repetition alone, despite knowing otherwise. Although that didn't hold ... their knowledge that the sky was blue was too powerful, and no harsher techniques were employed to break them down first, the subjects of the study had a difficult time differentiating between red and blue for a very long time after the study was concluded. I wish I could find the exact reference to that study, but I'm at work and the name of the study doesn't spring to mind for a handy google search. Perhaps some kind soul reading this will provide a link). Something like, say, a disgustingly flavored, surupy dark brown sugary drink laced with cocain or, when that becomes illegal, caffein. Especially if it has a nice bright, easilly recognized logo that can be plastered about, reinforcing that conditioning in people's every day lives, and especially if it has a short, rythmic name like, say, Coca-Cola.
... George Orwell's nightmare didn't come from government, it came from industry, powered not by some sinister desire to dominate mankind, but by simple, benal human greed. There is a very profound social lesson in all of this, though I'm not sure we as a society are very equipped to learn from it.
schon is absolutely right here, though the actual impact is missed (brand awareness is a very small part of the overall marketing picture).
Repetition is one of the most reliable indoctrination (often called by the misnomer "brain washing") techniques around, particularly if you are working without a deadline (if you do have a deadline, there are other, quite effective means of breaking a person and reconstructing the desired attitude, but while they are faster, none of these are anywhere near as reliable as simple repitition over an extended period of time). If you do not believe that marketing involves the application of serious indoctrination techniques, I suggest you read a couple of advanced textbooks, or graduate level thesis, on the subject. Indoctrination is most definitely what it is about, though that terminology is generally avoided.
In short, you can be talked into liking and desiring the most unlikely of things through sheer repetition, particularly if such repetition begins during early childhood (but it doesn't need to
When was the last time you made it through the day without seeing that logo, or hearing the name, at least once?
Advertisers do not want to allow us to change our viewing habits because doing so takes away one of the primary conduits by which they can condition us to want their products, and advertisers pay top dollar for access to these conditioning conduits. Believe it or not, we as viewers are sold as chattel to advertisers, literally, at a little over a dollar an hour for our viewership.
They have no desire to sell the content to us, to make us their customers. We are the chattel they sell to their paying customers today, the advertisers, and they don't believe they'll ever make as much money selling their entertainment to us as they do selling us to their advertisers.
It is rather a sobering and disturbing thought
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
the only ones i'll actually stay still for now are those funny blockbuster ones with the guinea pig and the rabbit
:)
Hrm... haven't seen that... and my wife used to work at BlockBuster too.
May have something to do with the two TiVo's in the house though
and you pay $10/month for it. How many other stations do you watch, and how much would it cost if you had to pay $10/month to watch each of them?
Best Slashdot Co
Only we do it, by paying more for the products advertised. So it is totally bogus to say, that the folks who skip advertising are "stealing". If they bought a can of coke they already payed for the commercial and thus the show.
Also the stations brought this upon them selves, by allowing adverts to become so annoying that nobody wants to see them, and by letting ads totally screw up their program. I don't have a TV anymore, since any films i want to watch i surely don't want to watch on TV. They're hacked to tiny little bits with the best scenes totally fucked up by inconvenient breaks and glaring blaring adverts.
So the "free television" is neither "free", nor is it fun. I really don't care if their business model goes down the drain. I really prefer to hand it over to the MPAA directly than being screwed twice by paying to the MPAA via Coke for the privilege of being served with annoying ads.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I'm not sure how the idea came to be that there was a contract, written or unwritten, between viewers and broadcasters. There's a contract between advertizer and broadcaster, it goes something like this:
Your show has a large audience. Show our ad during it so that all those people will see it. We'll give you money in return, which you can use to keep making your show.
The viewers are under no obligation to watch the ad. That's what advertising is all about, you make some noise and hope to get people's attention. If you can't do something interesting enough to get it, tough shit for you. Just because you put out an ad, you're entitled to some of my attention span? I think not.
Entropy gets everyone.
The accuracy of people self-reporting in Market research is a whole other kettle of fish. As someone said, the respondants are self selecting. Most of the market research reports I have seen just give percentages without errors -- usually because they either don't know or because the standard deviation is so high as to not be useful. It's very difficult to (truthfully) come up with a +/- for how many people lie or a self-deluding. It's the same reasoning behind why the weather forecast doesn't have a standard deviation given.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Just my .02, Advertising costs are added to product costs. Since we're pay for the products why should we have watch the ads that we've also paid for. With the exception of new product awareness and occasional reminders of a products existence this whole vicious circle just ends up costing the consumer more money.
Ads are more than annoyances that people like to ignore/skip, they also cost us $.
One of the biggest areas where directed consumerism occurs is in car ads: Small cars are shown with young people (the one, and very stand-out, commercial that bucks this trend is Suzuki with their Aerio commercial. Although I can't stand that commercial, I find it fascinating that they put a late 20s/early 30s professional woman as the driver of the `economy' Aerio, versus the standard 16 year old talking about how their friends want to buy it. It legitimizing that car for older people), luxury cars are show with late 30s/early 40s men, etc. This is to imbue the pubic with the idea that there is a car `progression of life', and if you're a 35 year old with a Hyundai Accent, well then what sort of loser are you? Instead of a public that buys into cars for utility, practicality and economy, people buy into the car that conveys their lifestyle/success as per the car marketing departments.
Look, your "call to action" is cute, in a naive sort of way. My point was not cynicism--it was instead that the PARTICULARs of this case at this point are not where you should be going up in arms because it's relatively humdrum legal maneuvering rather than any sort of watershed.
Sophomoric overdramatic words about the killing fields of cambodia (where i happened to have visited last week) ain't gonna change that, and, in fact, are emblematic of the exact sort of overreaction that i was talking about.
A lot of people complain about cable, saying "I'm paying for 150 channels when I only actually use 5 of them". With the onset of digital cable and satellite, along with pay-per-view, I think a more sustainable model for the future is "micropayment pay-per-view". Want a season pass to Boston Public? Sure, it's $1 per episode with unskippable ads, or $2 per episode without ads. We'll give you a 10% discount if you order the whole season at once.
Why would this work? For most people, it'd be cheaper or at most the same as what they're already paying. If they go on vacation for a couple weeks, either it doesn't cost them anything, or they'll be able to catch up on the shows when they get back. For the networks, they get fine-grained details of what people are watching, and will be able to easily manage their schedules. They could have special promotions for free showings of good but unpopular shows. And they'd be freed from the competition amongst the other networks for prime slots.
Josh Woodward
If they are so worried about people not wanting to watch commercials, then they should create a system that would create a *desire* to watch commercials. The belated adcritic.com was a good example of this. People went to this site specifically to watch commercials.
Although this would not work for all commercials, you could implement a Tivo rating system where people could judge commercials similar with a system similar to that of the slashdot moderation system. A huge database would be amassed and people could essentially go watch the top 10 every week. Not a bad deal...
Personally, I would pay money for a device that muted commercials so I don't have to do it myself.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Every time I read something like this it pushes me one-step closer to buy a PVR.
One or two more lawsuits and I will buy one, who make the best PVR for the money?
Hello all: ... the list goes on). If they asked us what we want instead of telling us what we want, maybe they could come up with a better way to pay for programming. i would be willing to pay a yearly fee, if I was confident that they would show us what we want.
Usually I just lurk, but I must say something about this.
Most of these network programming people are completely out of touch with their audiences. They continue to treat us a 3 year olds by telling us what our tasts are. They keep putting shows on at bad times and killing good shows (for example Good VS. Evil, Futurama
Thanks
Alex DeWolf
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Frankly, the idea of local programming is another example of technology who's time has past. Infinite channel capabilites on cable and satellite make it pretty useless. 99% of local programming is either syndicated or national network. The "Network" concept, as it relates to local affiliates is ridiculous. What do they provide that couldn't be provided nationally? Only one thing: Mediocre News. (In my area, anyway.)
Frankly, the only good model is pay-per-view. You choose the shows you want to watch, and when. Networks/Syndicators will offer one or some free episodes to get you hooked-- and so you can decide what you like. Pepsi will pay for an entire episode and their product will be featured throughout. PBS will continute to exist for free.
This doesn't necessarily mean $200 TV bills per month-- they'll probably offer some sort of Watch-Ad-get-rebate scenario. Look at the bright side-- you can bet those ads will be targeted.. (I'd rather watch technology-based ads that are for the tech savvy, rather than the idiots (dell guy) Frankly, the quality of the shows *and* the advertising will probably go up-- and don't worry, those on the true "bleeding edge" will come up with AI auto-ad watching devices.
Oh, sure, there will probably be a "retro" mode that has commercial breaks that can not be fast-forwarded (a-la DVD FBI warnings)... For those who don't like interactivity... or to "cushion" upcoming baby-boomer blue-hairs into new technology.
Local stations will be reduced to one or two (in small regions) "local news channels" that have a feed on cable/satellite. They provide this service for free, in exchange for local advertising (with no-skip commercials) or for a price.. Luckily, this will drive the "lowest common denominator news" out of business.
It will be a tough transition, but it's "whatever the market will bear," And it won't bear "free TV" but it will bear this.
(Proud Tivo Owner for +1 year)
All prity well known brandnames, and all with a large counter following. Infact you could probably find more people willing to protest to close a MCDonalds down than people willing to protest to keep it open!!!.
Coke, MCDonalds and Budweiser all spend a !lot! of money on advertising, Coke were so successfull that they managed to change christmass forever with a rotund Red santa (who likes a bit of coke!!).
Anyhow, these companies have a fairly sizeable cult following regardless of the quality of there products down to there large advertising expenditure, so proving that advertising does work.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It's a laissez-faire marketplace in most industrialized nations, with the US included. That means the broadcast companies (network TV, cable and satellite channels) and advertisers have to respond to the whims of the market. Anybody who's taken a class in economics 101 can tell you that. It's just so amazing to me that so many marketers and advertisers easily forget it.
Case in point: Is it possible to get through an hour-long program on the Sci-Fi Channel without seeing one of those cheap-ass Bowflex commercials with the overdriven guitar music track? With the harsh reality of aforementioned laissez-faire marketing, you've got to wonder how much of the Bowflex product prices actually represents the amount of money they spend on advertising it. The same can be said for the Bose WaveRadio.
This is the same manifestation of bombardment that is the reason we pay such high costs for prescription drugs in this market. How many times of airing the same "purple pill" ad spot will it take before every man, woman, child, cat, dog and goldfish in North America has a prescription for the Nexium crap?
About two weeks ago, my wife and I watched a movie we had taped off the Sci-Fi Channel (Quick! Call the Thought Police!) and I started to notice that there were commercial marathons every eight minutes or so of actual movie footage. I counted ten commercials per break in some cases, lasting for five minutes per commercial block, assuming 30 seconds for each spot. It was then we decided that any movies on Sci-Fi would not be worth watching...ever.
From my far-from-scientific observations, of the broadcast networks here in the US, ABC and NBC have the largest commercial interruptions. CBS backed down when they were in the ratings toilet a couple years ago. ABC, now the ratings dog in primetime, is hurting severely for an improvement in their ratings. So what do the brain-trust execs at Disney decide to do? Increase the length of commercial breaks on their ABC subsidiary. Brilliant.
Then the large entertainment conglomerates are surprised that commercial-eradication technology products start to pique the interest of the viewing public. Imagine that!
remove the 30-second skip feature and replace with a 2 or 3 minute skip feature. That way, you'll skip over all the commercials completely! It's funny how companies shoot themselves in the foot over things like this, ala the Big Record Companies and Napster. Those morons didn't realise that they had an automatic distribution system in place with Napster. The TV Networks can still sell ads, but now people have to skip over them one at a time. What happens if we just blow the whole block out?
I did like how the article pointed out what companies are doing to get around the potential, theoretical "loss of revenue". That at least shows that there are ways around it and that whining without action is just whining.
...actors are making 5000 to 1,000,000 per episode, I don't care about their revenue. Come and whine to me when TV actors make less then teachers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The only reason I watch the Super Bowl is for the interesting and funny commercials.
If adverisers want us to watch make us interested like that. Don't save the best stuff for one night a year.
One simple change that pvr companies could do to improve their relations with advertisers is to give you the ability to record just a commercial.
There are some really funny spots that I or my wife have saved an entire show for, so we could show each other, friends, etc. This dovetails beautifully with Replay's ability to send shows over the internet: allow unlimited forwarding of commercials and advertisers would see a dramatic increase in views. It could become the equivalent of those annoying joke fwds that everyone thinks you'll find so amusing.
Another option that pvrs give is the capability for highly targeted advertising. Ignoring (for the moment) the privacy concerns, I'm much more likely to watch an ad for a new TV than for a truck. Stations could set up special channels that just show ads continually at off hours, the pvr decides based on your viewing habits which it thinks you would like, records them, and just superimposes them in the ad space the shows provide.
The point is that advertisers are too scared of the potential dangers to see the potential advantages.
For example, why in the world do people pay three times as much for brand-name sodas over store brands with essentially the same formulation?
Our economic system does not promote wise activity, it just promotes activity. Anything to whip up a frothy head on the national economy so the cream can be skimmed from the top by the owners of the entrenched brands, and by those who make a cut every time a transaction of any kind takes place, regardless of what it is.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
People (well, CEO's anyway) are wondering how the broadcasters can continue to have unthwartable advertising with the current and future availability of VCRs and PVRs. The answer is to do away with interstitial advertising entirely as it can be removed easily.
The advertising has to be embedded in the show itself, and no, this doesn't mean product placement.
Consider that most people are getting larger and higher-def TV's now, and they can display more legible information on the screen.
The broadcasters have to do the following for advertising to work (and it may not be well liked):
* Letterbox all shows, they like this anyhow as it preps people for HDTV. When HDTV is more prevalent, letterbox at a more extreme horizontal ratio than 16x9 or squeeze horizontally for sidebands.
* Put the adverts in the black bars or black sidebands.
* Slide the show image up and down into the space the black bars are in every so often (try to coincide with scene changes), it forces the eyes to move back to the main image allowing a glimmer of an advert to be forced to the viewer's eyes, and it also prevents masking the bars. If someone masks the bars, they would have to get up and move the masking, and this would be more trouble than it's worth in most instances. I'm sure workarounds will be made, electronic masking that moves, but such things are not as trivial as deleting interstitials.
* animated ad bugs like the current network identifier bugs, at any one of the four screen corners.
Interstitial adverts are going to die off whether advertisers like it or not, but there are alternatives. Audio will be available on demand on an existing second audio channel, maybe some kind of agreement w/ hw makers to have a "flash" button to swap over to hear advert audio.
They can place ads right in the show. One of the "Freinds" can easily drink only pepsi & wear only rebok's. There are other ways of advertising than just running a 30 second spot. The TV networks and the advertisers do not want to do that. They can also place logo's on the screen. They do not want to do anything different.
Using a PVR is not different than changing the channel or fastforwarding on a TAPE. It's just got a computer in it and it's digital so we need new laws to make people watch the ads so we can make mony!!
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
Competition.
So Ford is only willing to pay $950,000? Well, I'll bet you telling them that you'll be happy to go to Chevy and offer them the spot for $1,000,000 if they don't shell out the cash would up thier ante a bit.
There will always be *some* company willing to pay what you are asking for the good spots, but it may require actually make a phone call or two and actually produce shows that people want to watch. God forbid the networks actually have to do some work now and then.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I think the problem with television network executives is that there's been a pretty strong warning about changes in TV viewing habits that Alvin Toffler mentioned in one of the most prophetic books ever written, The Third Wave.
The book was published (in 1979) at the time when home videocassette recorders were starting to become popular. What VCR's did was to effectively destroy the whole idea of synchonized television watching Toffler mentioned in this book, where everyone watched TV all at the same time. With VCR's (and now DVR's), you can record a TV program for viewing at a later time; the rise of VCR's was a big contributing factor in the ascendency of David Letterman's success (NBC's Late Night with David Letterman was one of the most recorded shows on TV, according to Nielsen Research).
Indeed, with VCR's being so inexpensive nowadays many people own more than one VCR; it makes even the idea of network counter-programming obselete since the viewer can record multiple shows at the same time and watch it later at their own leisure.
I think the networks will have to really start factoring in the wide use of VCR/DVR devices; in a way, ABC is already doing this by running a number of their ABC network first-run programs as a first rerun on the ABC Family cable channel.
That took some time and brainpower. Impressive, but I still hate poetry.
how I would LOVE to wipe my ass on Britney Spears in a Pepsi ad!
The advertising world is rapidly approaching the point when they are going to have to realize that TV ads are not >>nearly as effective as they thought they were.
Let's assume you're right. I don't see TV becoming pay-per-show, so that means that TV is essentially finished.
Without advertising sponsorship, most media goes away. TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, internet. None of these media have the capacity to support themselves without advertising, and any attempted alternative that omits advertising is too damaging to the medium that it won't work either in the same way.
How much do you think a monthly magazine with no advertising would cost? Far more than the current $3-5 cover price. Probably more like $15-20. How about a daily newspaper? Maybe $5-10. A first-run TV show? $20-25? I'm making the numbers up, and only loosely basing them on how much other items (books, trade journals mostly) cost when produced in similar non-mass-market volumes. But the point is that if we don't have advertising, we have to be prepared to either give up media or pay a lot more for it.
Ralph
Good lord.
... a future in which the freedoms of the past are exchanged for a more authoritarian future.
There is nothing sophomoric in pointing out the foolishness of observing a negative trend in one's society and then calling on everyone to "sit back and do nothing, don't worry and be happy" as you do.
There is nothing "cute" or "niave" in pointing out to people that, if they do follow your amazingly bad advice they and their society will likely reap the worst sort of outcome those trends can lead to
Indeed, the only thing more sophomoric than your elitist stab at uninformed cynicism in this thread is the fallacy that your vacation (or, unlikely but possible, work) in Cambodia somehow makes you more of an authority on what people should and should not be concerned about than someone who has chosen, instead, to spend their vacation in, say, Kenya or Nepal, or has instead worked in, say, China, Japan, and much of Europe, or for that matter someone who has never visited any of those places but has had the intelligence and wisdom to be observant as to the goings on in their own society and even, perhaps, try to do someting about it.
Well, actually, there is another thing even more sophomoric than that: tossing out insults like 'cute' and 'niave' rather than following up with a substantive rebuttal, another fallacy commonly referred to as 'ad homonim', and even more commonly as 'trolling.'
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I find this post hypocritical because your sig IS A FRIGGIN ADVERTISEMENT!
She had me until riiiiight there. Which goes to prove that one person's interesting/funny is another person's "throw something, ANYTHING at the TV to make it stop!!!" This ad was played so much during the holiday season and final four that I wanted to vow to never go to BlokBusta again. Except it's the closest vid rental store....
There are plenty of premium channels on cable that don't have advertising. And there are many European channels that have little or no advertising and are financed through a television tax.
I think we are better off without manipulative visual content that makes people fat, drunk, and go into debt anyway. The sad thing is that advertising works, even if you know what it is doing. Nobody is completely immune from it. The only way to be safe from advertising is not to watch it.
If it's true that brand awareness is the only (you say "primary", but go on to imply "only") purpose of advertising, then you're right.
But if part of the purpose is to get people to actually BUY the product, I have to wonder how effective ads are.
I grew up in America, know more than I'd ever like to admit about Budweiser ad campaigns, Dad drank the stuff, and LOVE beer, but I won't drink Bud piss-water without VERY signifcant cash payments.
So, how is it again that my "brand awareness" helps their bottom line?
The case can be made that the purpose of the ads is then to expose ignorant consumers to their products and thereby get people to try them, SOME of whom will like the product and decide to stay with it. If this is really the reason, then why should the ad-supported networks have a problem with PVRs?
According to the studies, TiVo users still watch 40 to 50% of the commercials. Care to guess whether those commercials they do watch are more often for products they already know about, or ones that are totally new to them?
More likely their complaining and lawsuits isn't intended to really accomplish anything except to create publicity for PVRs and INCREASE their sales numbers. Then the industry can make even LOUDER complaints about the "rampant" digital piracy they claim is destroying them. The logical solution then becomes to get Congress to enact some SSSCA or CBDTPA-type legislation.
Paper towels, maybe, but doubtful. Toilet paper? Uh... with the very strong societal taboo against bodily functions in the Western hemisphere do you honestly think any company would advertise on something you're about to wipe your ass with? Very negative association there.
There has been some advertising on the inside door of public toilets, but even that hasn't proven very successful. Plus it tends to get vandalized a lot.
As for the fetus - I don't think anyone's conclusively shown any effect of normal audio levels on the unborn. And since babies don't have the capability to process langugage for at least several months (and more commonly a year or so) after birth, I don't think you have to worry about it so much.
I own a Directivo, which bundles directv and tivo. Basically its a partnership, and I wouldnt doubt if $2 of the $10 tivo bill goes to directv for use of their signal for guide information and what not. Directv is then buying the broadcast rights to show those channels. In short, these networks are profiting off PVRs in a direct way! Maybe if they saw more of that money that'd shutup.
Another benefit to the networks is giving the consumer the ability to watch more TV thats targeted to their audience. With PVR, there is a siwtch from watching whatever is on to watching whats in your recorded queue. I would think that the ads in these shows would have more impact and be targeted closer to your market then whatever crap you happen to be watching.
I think the real fear from the networks is that eventually most people will be fast forwarding through commercials on the shows, but be forced to watch advertising bought on the PVR networks. I'm going to hate it, but maybe they will show you targeted ads based on your PVR subscription data. If it was smart enough (like amazon's recommendations) this might not be so bad. People will also accept too, sure they have to watch the tivo ad but they can skip all nbc ads.
"Put me on your do not call list."
:P
Works every time with telemarketers. After the first time, they don't call me again. And if they do, I can sue. How's that grab ya?
The thing is that even with cool commercials that I will watch, I'm NOT going to buy their freaking products! SO WHAT if I am familiar with the Budweiser brand name? They spend a lot on advertising, and sometimes have cool commercials. But that doesn't in ANY way change my mind about which beer I will drink. I wouldn't drink Budweiser even if they had NUDE MODELS dancing in their commercials. (but I might watch! ;) )
I don't need a new computer, so there is no way I would buy a DELL computer based on their advertising. Even if they had a commercial where the 'Dell Dude' got his ass beat up, I might watch it but it wouldn't lead me to buy a computer.
So, I think building the brand is a farce as well.
The other thing that bugs me is a quote from the article:
"You start losing marginal dollars when people who you thought you were buying are not viewing"
See there, they just *think* that consumers are buying based on commercials. Better still, they seem to be recording profits based on this theory.
I'm gonna go un-pause my TiVo and skip some commericals just for the heck of it. Man, do I love my TiVo.
--
I suppose that at some time long ago ads were intended to inform consumers of availble products/services. But now we have Google and the rest of the net...more information than any one person could ever digest. We do't need ads. The only purpose ads serve now are to influence. Personally I don't like being influenced by entities that do not have my best intrest at heart. I'd rather pay Fox directly for an episode of the Simpsons than to pay Ford to pay Fox for an episode of the Simpsons.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
I'm hoping for a brave new world where there are no networks, just content providers from which we will buy viewing rights to shows we want to see and those shows will be downloaded to our PVRs when then become available. Say $5 per episode for something like Sopranos and $.50 for Frasier. Let the market determine what they want and when they want it. No more unwelcomed advertising! Please lets make this happen. OK?
You just use an all-green, blue, etc., box or soda can or restaurant sign, etc. sign during filming, much like shooting an actor in front of the green screen, then in post you add in the appropriate logo.
This has advantages for Hollywood - you don't have to sell all this stuff before the movie is made. You can sell limited-time contracts, so when ET goes to video he's eating M&M's because they payed more, and you can internationalize the product placements more effectively.
For TV shows, the studios can eventually ship the raw show to the TV station, who can put the local-market sponsor's product in just-in-time. The sponsor will have provided a clip-art-like library of their products, and the scenes will be annotated with some sort of scene-description meta -file (say MPEG4) and the software will know how to do the proper translation and warping to make the 'clip-art' fit. That's probably a few years in the future, but they should be shooting that way now so they can be ready for syndication.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Based on the demands of Hollywood and the recording industry to date, and the trends in Washington, how on earth can you justify a "don't worry, be happy" attitude like this?
Did I miss the bulletin where television was made a requirement in my life? I hope not, because I haven't owned a television for two years now; and I've gotten along quite well without it.
If you don't like the current entertainment market, read a book or go for a walk. Do something healthy and productive with your life. But stop whining when there's really not much you can do about it in the first place. . .
. . .and for Gods' sake, don't compare this little television "crisis" to the Cambodian or Soviet massacres. Your having to sit through one more annoying car dealership ad cannot possibly compare to the obscene conditions under which millions of Cambodians and Soviets lived and died.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The problem is that model the commercials use: they drum,drum,drum the message into your subconscious -- they aren't meant to be attractive or interesting to your conscious mind. I seldom watch TV, but when I do the deliberate and colossal stupidity of ads. They would be an insult to your intelligence, if it weren't clear that the intelligent, critical part of your mind is supposed to tune them out so they can do their work on the receptive, non critical parts.
Well, a new day is dawning, and advertisers had better get with the program.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So watching commercials will save TV executives!!??!!
First off TV Executives, like the one for Turner Networks and other superstations, get money from Cable Companies and satellite companies because those companies are going to sell the stations to their customers. So tell me how TBS in Atlanta is free for people in California or Illinois?
Second, what is difference from me leaving my television on and not watching television or commericals than having a REPLAY or TIVO or VCR record a program? Either way the program was view (technically) and the users decides to watch the commerical or fast forward.
Third, they should be thankful for TV or REPLAY or VCR. Without these devices I would only be able to watch one program on one tv station. With the devices they technically are reaching more customer than they could normal achieve without the technology. (I get to watch more than one program in any time slot, because I record it with a VCR/REPLAY/TIVO.)
Commericals do help local television stations, but it does not do anything to the super stations. Without a satellite or cable hookup I will not be able to watch Turner Networks or anything else.
So in closing TV executives should be thankful they have an audience that had to pay some fee to watch the program and thankful for the households in America which records television shows with Tivo/REPLAY/VCR. Otherwise they would struggle finding people willing to watch their networks.
"If an advertiser buys `NYPD Blue' on Tuesday night, and 10 percent of its audience watches it on Friday after midnight, should that audience be given equal value as the `live' prime- time audience?"
Pur idiocy! An advertiser isn't paying for the time of day that his ad runs, he's paying for how many people watch it. If 10% of those people watch it at midnight instead of at 7:00 p.m., still the same number of people are watching it! The reason prime-time ads cost more is because that's when most people are watching! (People skipping over commercials is at least a valid concern, but this part is ludicrous.)
Second:
"We need to start to understand how we're going to have to reach our consumers with this new technology," said Mollie Weston, a product manager for Best Buy's image advertising. "It is going to force us to put advertisements out there that people are actually going to choose to watch."
Duh! If you want people to pay attention to something they don't want to pay attention to, you're fighting a losing battle. People aren't going to be watching the commercials anyway, if they don't want to. They'll be at the toilet or at the refrigerator, or surfing other channels. (And maybe finding another program they'd rather watch.) It seems to me that ads would be a lot more effective if they were more entertaining. (There are some that I can't wait to see again, because they're so hilarious -- I'm sure you've had the same experience.)
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
From reading that article it feels (unlike the movie and music industries) like the advertising interested is actually looking at ways to change their business to adapt to the new technology.
Granted some idiots run around screaming "theft" but, most of the article talks about alternative ways to advertise, I especially like the quote from the rep. who said "We'll have to start making ads that people want to watch".
it would be nice if all of the ads were as entertaining as the super bowl ads, and thats what we have to look forward to if people follow through on that article.
From the TiVo FAQ:" In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
It must have taken you 10 minutes to put together such an insightful post.
Great work! Mod up! Mod up!
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
Advertising is becomming so intrusive and invasive I'm really starting to get sick of it... It's plastered on my computer screen, TV, billboards, radio, there's even 30 minutes of commercials when you go to the theater and pay to get in!!
do you honestly think any company would advertise on something you're about to wipe your ass with?
Speaking of which, there are a great number of urinals in this country where the rubber liner has "Say no to drugs" printed on it. Which you are then expected to piss on...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I disagree. The Old Navy commercials are so bad they are good. Particularly when they had the old lady with the big old Harry Caray (late Chicago Cubs announcer) glasses.
To have her, of all people, talking about fashion!
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
To: Turner Broadcasting Grant Applications
I would like to apply for a grant to study the effects of Kellner's apparent agreement with filing lawsuits
against Tivo, SonicBlue, and ReplayTV personal video recorder makers for 'commercail skipping".
Apparently he thinks my $40/mo for cable TV is a gift from Santa Claus, and that I should be physically
strapped to my chair with my eyes propped open with toothpicks to watch his ads.
My study would center on the effects of pissing off good customers of AOL Time Warner and their
advertisers by suing good companies out of business and putting people in my town out of work
(SonicBlue).
Since I also tend to skip commercials due to my bladder, I would also develop a software program
to calculate the relative chance of AOL Time Warner suing me for going to the bathroom during
commericials. This would include weighted variables like age, sex, right or left handedness, remote
control carpal tunnel, beer brand, drink container size, and the digital divide.
Oh, I need $100,000 dollars to complete these studies. Thanks.
Hehhehe.. Record a commercial? I don't even do that now. that's what the "Pause" button is for.
You and I are clearly from different planets. I think it is quite strange to record the program you're watching. What's the point? I record things I can't watch for one reason or another.
For example, I record things when my wife watches something on a different channel. Or I record things that are broadcast when I'm asleep or at work or having a squirt-gun fight with my 6-year-old.
If I'm sitting there watching the thing, why on Earth would I record it? So I can watch that sporting event again, knowing exactly what's going to happen? So I can amaze my friends by identifying the murderer at the beginning of the program (assuming they don't already know because they watched it when it was broadcast)?
Well, whatever melts your butter.
Igor
Ah, yes. Well, recording a documentary is something that happens often in my house. When I grew up, seeing something like Jaques Cousteau was special. There were very few science shows then. I love Discovery, TLC, et al.
There are a number of reasons to tape a show, not least among them the same drive that causes many people to save a book: I can read (watch) it again knowing that I will enjoy it. I still have some paperbacks that I bought 30-35 years ago. And yes, I have read some of them recently. Dog-earred and worn, but still reliable entertainment.
I know how "A Christmas Carol" (with Alastair Sim) turns out, but that doesn't stop me from watching it again. The same holds true for things certain shows from The Discovery Channels family. Things that I find enjoyable, but not $20 enjoyable.
Now that many entertainment series are being put on DVD the desire to record a pure entertainment show is much lower. But I'm telling you, I'd sure as hell would like to have "Kolchak: the Night Stalker," and several others. Especially some of the old comedies before they became sitcoms and got so tied up in the moralizing trend. "Car 54" never moralized. It was always funny.
I'd liked to have been able to tape the Rolling Stones when the came on Don Kirscner's Rock Concert in 73, too. That was a great show.
Well, I'm rambling now.... See-ya later.
I use a VCR (tape). I skip ads as well... unless they are intersting.
I will watch "Fry's Electronics" ads *once* -- the first time I see them. I know that Fry's changes their ads once a week (on Wednesday). Even when I'm watching "live" (rarely), I "tune them out" of my attention.
I will watch the "Levi's Crazy Legs" ad over and over again. Even though I know that they did digital compositing, so that his upper body is upright, instead of being hunched over. I even like the fact that the music is not mainstream pop, and is, instead, Spanish language.
The real fear here is not about "ad skipping", it's about the content being stored digitally, and the transportability of digitally stored content.
I can think of several technical solutions to the problem that we're *really* talking about: edditing digital content to remove the ads. But I'll be damned if I'll share them with people too stupid to figure them out on their own. 8-).
The company that provides all the data is Zap2it.
www.zap2it.com
many bars have recently put little ad stations right above the urinals. so, while you stand there trying to mind your own business, you can learn about the wonders of the latest Ford SUV.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Brand awareness is a means, not an end. The advertsier is paying to increase sales. If the effect of brand awareness is that potential purchasers avoid the brand, then the advertising campaign is a failure. Annoying consumers in order to get them to remember your product sometimes backfires.
If you buy a replaytv then all your viewing data belongs to them. Then they use your tv and your pvr to force feed you targeted ads when you pause, in banners on menus etc.
This cached google page is why I will not be buying a replaytv. When will device manufacturers make a decent product and leave me the fuck alone after the sale. I have money to spend and I will not support companies that harass me.
We have the best government that money can buy.
is that they have gone from an average of 7 ads per commercial break to about double that in just the past few years. I get so bored with the commercials and the respective lack of content in the shows (the time has to come from somewhere) that I completely tune out. I generally don't even watch TV anymore. The rare times I do, I watch some news shows without ads or a movie that I wanted to see.
If the advertisers got a clue, they would have fewer ads in every break. The ads have gone beyond the breaking point! Do you remember when you had to rush during the commercial break to get back from the fridge in time not to miss any of your show? I can now go to the bathroom, get some snacks from the fridge, and then slowly wander back to the TV and still watch an ad or two. This has just gotten to be too much.
People are having a revolt. They are throwing away the ads because they are so frustrated and technology has finally caught up to the point where it makes it easy for a person to do so. The VCRs that skip commercials automatically and now the PVRs doing the same thing. Maybe they will get a clue, but I happen to doubt it. They will probably just put in more commercials in each segment to make up for the loss of revenue.
My name fits again.
my whole point was that this is /not/ indicative of a trend, but rather that this is just 'to be expected' legal maneuvering. my whole point was that the market is playing itself out and that there is no particular reason for the slashbots to come out declaring this to be another sign of the end times. as you have done.
(if you'll pardon my sentence fragments, i'll try to overlook that six line long run-on sentence which you penned.)
your post doesn't merit a 'substantive rebuttal' because your 'substantive rebuttal' to my post is nothing more than argumentum ad misericordium-- a stylized "no, you're wrong hey hey ho ho evil corporations have got to go."
a substantive rebuttal on your part would have showed that the legal maneuverings going on are likely to produce a result which is substantially counter to reasonable expectations. given the history of industry attempts at legal maneuverings based on similar 'implied contracts' with consumers, my specific point is that we have little to fear. furthermore, a substantive rebuttal would go on to say that even if the legal system failed on this issue, market forces would not restore the lost consumer surplus in one way or another... again.. bloody unlikely given current technological trends. the broadcast providers, as we know, need to compete.
so, mr 'substantive rebuttal,' how about instead of some, franky, bizarre spiel about spending vacations in kenya or heroic claptrap about 'freedoms of the past,' talk about the fucking issues.
(ill bet ANYBODY that the person i am writing to is an american undergraduate student, whether he admits to it or not.)
my whole point was that this is /not/ indicative of a trend, but rather that this is just 'to be expected' legal maneuvering. my whole point was that the market is playing itself out and that there is no particular reason for the slashbots to come out declaring this to be another sign of the end times. as you have done.
(if you'll pardon my sentence fragments, i'll try to overlook that six line long run-on sentence which you penned.)
your post doesn't merit a 'substantive rebuttal' because your 'substantive rebuttal' to my post is nothing more than argumentum ad misericordium-- a stylized "no, you're wrong hey hey ho ho evil corporations have got to go."
a substantive rebuttal on your part would have showed that the legal maneuverings going on are likely to produce a result which is substantially counter to reasonable expectations. given the history of industry attempts at legal maneuverings based on similar 'implied contracts' with consumers, my specific point is that we have little to fear. furthermore, a substantive rebuttal would go on to say that even if the legal system failed on this issue, market forces would not restore the lost consumer surplus in one way or another... again.. bloody unlikely given current technological trends. the broadcast providers, as we know, need to compete.
so, mr 'substantive rebuttal,' how about instead of some, franky, bizarre spiel about spending vacations in kenya or heroic claptrap about 'freedoms of the past,' talk about the fucking issues.
(ill bet ANYBODY that the person i am writing to is an american undergraduate student, whether he admits to it or not.)
FREE television?? Since when! Where can I get this FREE television? Surely TURNER BROADCASTING, a CABLE network isn't talking about LOCAL broadcasts that people can get on an antenna, is he? I hope not. Cable costs are way too expensive, and TV is getting to cost far too much to have. In fact the govnt is considering regulating it again because the entire reason they deregulated it was to lower costs. Instead it has gone up by 40% when it should have gone DOWN by 40% (You should be able to get full extended cable for around $15/mo - not $50). Hopefully this will squash any notions these nimrods have about "making us pay" because the govnt simply wont let that happen. Either play the game nice or we'll have the bouncers sit on your chest for us. *evil grin* Ahhh... Life is grand, isnt it?
Has anyone else noticed that the length of commercial breaks seems to be getting longer? On a recently taped show, I checked my VCR's tape timer at the start and end of three consecutive commercial breaks. They were 4:30, 4:00, and 4:30 minutes long, amounting to approximately 29% of the total time slot. In years past, it seemed like commercial breaks accounted for 25% or less of the total time.
..."
It's as if advertisers felt like commercials aren't as effective as they used to be, so their answer is to give you even more!
"The more you tighten your grip,
I agree that brand awareness is created when I accidentally see a commercial. However, that brand awareness is not always a positive thing.
;)
Personally, I hate advertising so much that I refuse to buy any product I remember seeing on TV -- everything is a Glad Man garbage bag commercial to me.
Manufacturers, If you want to sell to me, you do not want me to develop brand awareness via TV comercials!
And with food products at least, if the taste doesn't catch on, it's dead -- anyone remember "New Coke"? It tasted too much like Pepsi (the intent IIRC); Pepsi drinkers didn't see any need to switch, and traditional Coke drinkers with any kind of functioning taste buds refused to go along after the first taste (like me ;-). And then there are those without taste buds (or not picky ones at least) who just buy whatever's on sale for the lowest price that week (sorta like what I do with some beers - some are below my taste acceptance, but not all that many ;-)
Advertising is not invincible.
How about cutting out the networks entirely? Why can't I go to the content creators and purchase my content directly from them?
AC: I'd like to order a season of Buffy, All the NFL games and Shark Week please.
Clueful Entertainer: That'll be $27.50 please.
Here in the USA, the only time where you have to own more than one VCR and/or DVR is during the months of November, February and May, the periods where advertisers closely monitor TV viewship to determine advertising rates (the so-called sweeps periods). That's when you really need to have multiple machines running at the same time; back on 19 May 2002 you had to choose between the X-Files finale, the Cosby Show reunion, the season finale of Survivor and the season finale for The Practice. There was much complaints about this and it appears they may not try this again soon.
I would hazard 90+ % of the /. readership have grown up being bombarded with "advertizing". Maybe our "antibody titer" to the advertizing "antigen" is reaching a significant level in Western cultures.....
"...someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
I already do fscking pay for television. If I wanna pay for a Tivo so I can miss the commercials (which I also pay to see) I won't feel like I'm taking food off the networks' tables. It isn't like I escape the constant bombardment of advertising messages just by skipping the ads. There's product placements and ghost logos and ticker messages and probably soon to be banner ads embeded in the actual programs. Nobody is gonna get away from it.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
One of the ways to gain sponsorship in a film or television show during productgion is product placement. As an extra in a film a while back I was the dozing subway rider that held the coffee cup with the name of the company that supplied the coffee to the production company. - Advertising ! You see it all the time - The signs on buildings and trucks driving through a scene.. In a DVR world wouldn't they try and carry it further and place the key comercials in the scenes as they did in the movie "The Truman Show"? Just strenghten the appearanceof the product placement and like its presence plot. Will it happen? Time will tell...
Looks like someone from Nike decided to mod me up, should have been +1 deadly serious!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Maybe they didn't 'invent' it, but they sure as hell took it from obscurity to tradition.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I'm browsing and posting using Lynx, which makes banner ads pretty useless.
Does this mean that doubleclick.net are gonna haul the Lynx coders into court, and force me to start using Internet Exploder?
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
You discover new shows by giving away samples of shows for free. It's the same principal of your friendly neighborhood crack dealer: "Ah, I see you watch a lot of Simpsons episodes, try an episode of Futurama on us!"
Josh Woodward
Doesn't work- I have a Sony Tivo 30Gb model, un-hacked/modified. When I enter this sequence from the live TV screen, or the list, or Tivo central screens this doesn't work, what am I doing wrong?
Hmmm. Works on mine, which is a hacked Phillips with dual 100GB hard drives. I loaded the code while a recorded program was running and it gave me a sequence of three beeps that I had never heard before. Then the 30 sec skip worked like the FAQ said. My suggestion - try entering the code WHILE A RECORDED PROGRAM IS RUNNING.
You need to enter the backdoor-enabling password, FIRST, which varies by TiVo operating system version.
;)
If you have version 3+, it's "3 0 BC". Note the 2 spaces and the ZERO. You have to enter this in the "browse by programs" area and then hit the "thumbs up". If you hear three "ding" sounds, and see 'Backdoors Enabled', you're golden.
Or just search the TiVo boards and FAQs.
As a side note, I can't believe there are people who have an internet connection that STILL don't know this stuff. Shame!
Note the first words -- in version 2.5. If you have a different version of TiVo software (and lots of people do) it won't work. These shortcuts seem to change radically between software versions. Check a subset of the site referenced (the TiVo Hack FAQ) for more detail, and check software version and use at your own risk.