How Could TV Survive Without Commercials?

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I'm sure many of the readers of this site know the joy of skipping commercials using a TiVO, Replay or other form of PVR box. I'm sure it has occurred to a lot of us that if someone produced a schedule of commercial stop/start times the PVR could easily make all commercials instantly vanish from a recording. While this would be really cool, if it got really popular it would KILL all the local TV stations and TV networks who depend on ads to survive. Sure, you could say it's their fault for having an outdated business model, but there's a problem: these sources are where A LOT of the content for your PVR comes from. If they die, there's nothing for your PVR to record. My question for this crowd is: 'If the commercials stopped tomorrow, what business models can you come up with that would keep TV content flowing to your PVR?'"

"I've heard a few interesting ideas such as:

• having people pick a few ads from a list and watch them before each show...
• ...giving advertisers a profile of your interest and let them show you a (smaller number) of unskippable ads for things you are really interested in...
• ...ahaving the products show up in the show itself (product placement). For example: Buffy, after killing a vampire, could then slam down a Mountan Dew.

The most obvious alternative is to send your favorite shows to you via broadband and have you pay by the show. But would you pay to watch Buffy, The News, Star Trek? Would you prefer pay by the show, subscribe to a show/network or be forced to watch commercials? I'm interested in hearing what system would bug you the least, or if you have your own ideas how it could work."

Comments

In show ads

[essdodson]

You're starting to see these now and they range from something like having the actors do something like their laundry and the show shrinks onscreen to display an advertisement for a particular brand of laundry detergent. This was recently tested and had great results. I'm sure you'll see more of this. We'll also probably see much more branding in the actual shows as well. Something like all the characters wearing one brand of clothing.

I think this may provide some hope, but I think without traditional commercials they'll be in a tough spot to make ends meet.

Video On Demand

[Brian_Ellenberger]

The magical "any day now" video on demand is here. On ATT Broadband in Atlanta I now have a certain selection of movies that are on VOD. It is $2.99 for an older movie and $3.99 for a newer one I believe. The coolest thing is that you can fast forward, rewind, pause, and stop and save for viewing later.

I believe TV shows can fall under the same model. Maybe the first show (the pilot) is free and each show afterwards is some cost. The cable companies can of course run package deals and such (50 shows a month for X dollars) and the cost may be pretty low if many people watch.

Interestingly, this model bypasses both TiVo's and commercial television's revenue models.

Brian Ellenberger

Re:We already do pay for TV without commercials

[Afrosheen]

We pay a premium for these already because they braodcast with few or no channels.

What? Few or no channels? I think you mean few or no commercials, and I agree. Pay tv is the way to go, 99% of 'network tv' sucks ass and there's nothing worth watching. I'll take a handful of cable channels with no ads over 100 free channels any day. Obviously Tivo owners agree.

I think Springsteen said it best "57 channels and nothin' on".

Re:Great if you're socialist

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually its illegal to watch TV without a license. They even take your name and address now when you buy a TV or VCR.

A little about VBI

[cr@ckwhore]

There's all kinds of hidden data within your television picture... closed caption data, date/time, interactive guide data,v-chip data, and even URLs. This data is transmitted in the VBI, or the Vertical Blanking Interval, which is (loosly) the unused space between scanlines.

Much like spam filters, there are a few approaches that can be taken to apply statistical data and pattern recognition to the VBI data, which could then be used to skip commercials automatically. There are a few hobbyists doing this.

Since time data is also included in the VBI, the TV stations have exact lists of when commercials are to be inserted by their parent networks. This information, if obtained, could be useful when used in conjunction with the time data in the VBI.

Here's a good place to start reading if you want learn about your VBI... http://www.robson.org/gary/writing/nv-line21.html

Well, the BBC has "survived," hasn't it?

[dpbsmith]

At the first of a) pointing out the obvious, and b) getting flamed, there ARE other ways in the world to support television besides commercial services sponsored by advertising.

I don't say you have to like the BBC. I don't say I would like this as a solution in the U. S. I just say, here is an existence proof. Here's one way television can and has "survived" without advertising.

As it says here,

The BBC's domestic radio and TV services are financed by the television licence fee.

The current licence fee (from 1 April 2002) is £112.00 for colour and £37.50 for black and white.

Anyone aged 75 or over is now entitled to a free TV Licence for their principal address.

If you are registered blind you only pay 50% of the full licence fee.

For less than 30p a day (colour), the licence fee pays for:

The television channels BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC Choice, BBC FOUR, BBC News 24 and BBC Parliament;

Five network radio services, plus the BBC Asian Network, and new digital radio services launching in 2002;

Regional TV programmes and Local Radio services in England;

National Radio & TV in Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland;

BBCi.

Re:Um, how would anything change?

[funky womble]

Yes it is - different minerals. In some of the more extreme cases (particularly comparing bicarb-heavy ones with the more neutral ones) there are quite different flavours.

Re:Its funny...

[Psiren]

Not directly perhaps. But that money goes to the government, and the government runs the BBC. AFAIK, none of the money received through licenses ever gets to ITV or C4. They are independant broadcasters and they make their money through ads.

It depends what TV can do for me...

[drnomad]

In Holland, we have public television. Usually because the government provides the channels with a very high budget paid from the people's taxes. Also laws say that the channels should have certain percentage of education, certain percentage of culture and certain percentage of etc...

Sure, these channels provide much better TV (well, for me anyway) rather than the commercial channels, which broadcast the same average bull as the US channels do.

I think there are several questions you might ask yourself when creating a business model. What can TV do for its audience?

Once, four of the 8 commercial channels here in Holland, who own the best watched soap opera, announced that they would go behind the digital decoder. They made a gamble that people's addiction to this soap would force people to accept the new system. But what happened, a smaller national channel announced that they would never go behind the decoder and they owned a soap opera which was less popular, but still. So in the end, nobody went behind the decoder.

So what is TV for people? Education? Entertainment? There's one little problem with TV : forcing the customer to do anything that they're not doing now and which costs them more money will end-result in a competitor giving the same service without the force. People want freedom, not watching Buffy does not mean you're gonna die.

Just simply thinking of a business model is not enough. There's enough TV around anyway - you must have a good reason for me to watch your stuff.

By the way, both education and entertainment have substitutes: go to a theatre or a concert or perhaps read a good book. No TV does not mean no fun.

I guess you really have a problem.

Re:Great if you're socialist

[dvdeug]

One of the great advantages of having no ads is that there is no concept of ratings. [...] you can concentrate on the providing quality content,

You can provide content which will please the programmers. You will, however, have little indication of what pleases the public and honestly little reason to care. Stuff like that tends to carry fairly esoteric material, aimed to a narrow subset of the public (not nessecarily your subset!), instead of widely popular content.

that's not true either

[Trepidity]

If you can prove that you don't watch any television channels, you do not have to pay. If you watch television channels, but never watch the BBC, you still have to pay for it. So it's illegal to watch TV without paying for the BBC, even if you hate the BBC and never watch it.

Re:Great if you're socialist

[Zeinfeld]

Actually, this statement is incorrect. The BBC sold more than one million licenses before its first radio broadcast [bbc.co.uk] on 14 November 1922. Its first television broadcast [bbc.co.uk] wasn't until 2 November 1936, when there were only a few thousand television receivers. Obviously, the BBC license fee was not created to protect newspaper advertising revenues from TV.

That is where you are wrong. The BBC was from the very start conceived as a television and radio broadcasting company. Considerable sums were spent on research into television and a substantial amount of the technology used in modern TV was developed by the BBC.

The BBC was formed as a corporation in 1922 and received its royal charter in 1927. The first television signals were broadcast in 1936. The Hansard records of the House of Commons debates demonstrate that the potential of television was fully understood.

It does not take a great leap of imagination to realize the potential of combining the movies and radio. The newspaper barons understood correctly that TV would threaten both their power and their revenues.