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Pop-up Ads Coming to A TV Near You
Muddie writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that television execs and advertising agencies think product placement and the 30 second commercial spot are not getting the respect they deserves from us consumers, so in order to combat us ignoring them, there will be pop-up ads taking up the lower quarter of your screen during normal programming. Not only that, but the ads will run during relevant portions of the programming (see a guy shaving in the mirror, get a pop-up ad from a razor company). Do "They" think we just don't see enough advertising in a day? If you aren't busy throwing things through your television yet, you can read the article over here (with no pop-up ads)."
this isn't meant to be annoying.
sure, i like to watch a movie now and then, but honestly people, you'll be better off and enjoy life more if you turn of the tele, or get rid of it altogether. why not?
They really don't talk about the fact that many now have 29"+ tv's in their homes. With a larger screen, losing part of it to ad's won't seem like such a horrible deal to many. We've already been conditioned by ESPN with it's sports ticker and CNN/et al with their news tickers. The shrinking of the content really sucks on 19" and smaller tv's, but with more and more people watching on their 51" projectors, this should help the networks and advertisers out a lot.
I'm glad I live in a country with advert-free TV [bbc.co.uk].
Yeah - unfortunately TV is not FREE in the UK adverts or no adverts - can you believe we are expected to pay £107 a year for a TV license? I dont watch TV and so I dont have a license. This tiny detail doesnt stop them HOUNDING me - they just assume that I do watch it without a license (which I dont, I SOOO dont) and they automatically get granted search warrants to break into and search your property, however it is not illegal to merely OWN a TV set, just to "use TV receiving equipment to receive or record television broadcast services". Yes, this includes TV cards in computers.
Whoa now! Don't go giving them ideas! I could totally see the Quake iii screens flashing ads for Pepsi, rather than just static!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
It's also fairly common on regualr TVs, VCRs and DVD players, for people who are watching a widescreen-format movie and would rather crop some bits off at the sides than see the bars along the top and bottom. Sure, zooming loses a bit of resolution, but that's preferable to seeing continuous banners.
So in the future if you get brutally gibbed, your first instinct should be to type.. "Woulda had you if it hadn't been for that stupid pop-up..." Or "Between the lag and the popups, I'm getting 0wn3d!"
Wow. A whole new exuse for noobs. *chuckle*
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I don't know about you, but it is still the most annoying thing on television right now. Remember when they had that Car-mod program? They were relentless with that. Discovery is losing its place in my heart anyway, with the advent of all these f--king cop shows. If i wanted to see that, I would watch reruns of cops on FX. I want more animals, more astronomy, and more, well, what discovery used to be.
It seems to me that this is very similar to the problems we're having with the recording industry and MP3s.
Their business model has broken and they're trying vainly to simply patch it up by calling in the lawyers and copy-protection gurus instead of addressing the root cause -- lack of value for money.
The same goes with the free-to-air (FTA) ad-funded TV broadcast model. They're losing advertising revenues because technology (TiVo/ReplayTV) is marginalizing their business model. Like the recording industry, they're trying to patch up this shonky model by simply ramping up the intrusiveness of the advertising -- which will have entirely predictable results.
So... here's the solution:
Just as the Net allows MP3 music files created by independent recording artists to be distributed in high quality and at low cost, the use of DivX now allows indie TV producers the chance to get their programming out there at low cost.
Just look at how widely distributed and highly praised the indie 405 movie became thanks to its release on the Net.
Just as in the music industry, there are a lot of really talented producers, directors, actors and effects people out there who might gain significiant benefit when FTA TV finally pushes their luck too hard and really piss off viewers.
I'm sure that most of us would consider a subscription or short (30-60 second) advertisement at the start of each indie movie as a small price to pay in order to enjoy more of great stuff like this -- whilst thumbing our noses at the FTA networks and their lame business model.
The secret to success is realising that an obstacle in your path is simply the chance to climb up and gain a better vantage point.
Of course, most people don't have anything other to occupy their time these days anyway, so they might as well watch their programming in all of it's purely marketing glory.
Heh, did anyone else see Minority Report? What brilliant irony, a film with tons of stuff showing how scary, invasive, and annoying advertising could become, is a film laced with product placement from beginning to end...
How long till the moon has a Pepsi or a Nike logo staring down at all of us. We the people, we the consumers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Rambling rant alert:
Though I can't find it right now, Cringley wrote an article about why internet advertising has failed. It pretty much boils down to the net not being another way to tell people about things they should buy but rather a way to give people things in return for money. Don't advertise software, sell it. Don't advertise cars, lease them. Don't advertise phone books, sell information.
Is TV going the same way? There was a time when people bought programming by watching ads. Turns out the programming isn't worth the ads anymore (not when we can buy something so we don't have to watch them, anyway). I just got cable last year because it's free but it seems to me the plan was that you paid for the content on cable TV with money rather than by watching ads. But now there's at least as much advertising on cable TV as there is on broadcast TV, and they still want money for it. People are desperate enough for variety to pay for a while but someting has to give.
I refuse to believe there is any technical reason why phone, cable TV, and other data can't all go down the same fiber for less than the cost of all that copper wire and equipment cluttering up my house. Besides, wasn't bandwidth supposed to be too cheap to meter by now? A C Clarke was right - the telcos should have abolished long distance charges for y2k. One cent a minute, any time of the day, anywhere in the world. I'll bet they'd do just fine. Storage has gotten too cheap to meter now. It's going to hit $1/GB in the next month, so I can dump a terabyte into a fileserver and by the time I fill it up, the price will have dropped another order of magnitude. Bandwidth should be the same. Most of my needs can be satisfied by 1 megabit of bandwidth, and all are covered by 10Mb. We've got somewhere around 300,000,000 people in the USA. At 10 dollars per megabit per month, that's 36 billion dollars a year. How much money do you think it would take to give every person in the US a megabit of bandwidth? $100 billion? A certain 5 people could cover that. For a trillion dollars, I think it's too big a project, but I'll bet you could do it for less than that. Remember all that dark fiber everyone's talking about? Well, it's not free to use, but $twenty billion buys an awful lot of network hardware. And $80 billion buys an awful lot of in-home hookups. Someone who has prices for really high-end network equipment run me some numbers and see if I'm talking out my ass or not.
It just makes me want to hug the TV licence fee ~$160 per year. This gives me 8 TV channels with no ad breaks - whole uninterrupted movies.
Just imagine a whole evening's viewing without anything allegedly washing whiter.
The UK TV licence, you can't justify it but by gum it works!
You know what's on nowadays? Nothing. The news is filled with hooligans who act like comedians rather than giving us any news. Combine this with a lineup of shows that are left wanting, and hey, it's the reason my tv is hardly ever on.
Maybe I need cable. But even then, I'd probably just watch the History Channel, which I don't think is worth $35-60 a month.
Ya know what my TV is for?
Watching DVDs. Oh, shit, I shouldn't have said that. It's only a matter of time before they start putting pop up commercials in those, too.
I think I've been quite successful not to watch commercials for two years. I got rid of my TV set. Actually it broke and I didn't replace it.
These days I watch movies and my favourite sci-fi series DVDs on my computer which has pretty good stuff attached to secure comfortable viewing of such media.
Look ma, no in-between-ads!
News you ask? I get plenty of that at work. Working in a newspaper has its advantages...