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BitTorrent Inc. Introduces Ad-Supported Downloads
BTJunkie writes "BitTorrent Inc. is experimenting with alternatives to paid downloads on their Entertainment Network, and is now experimenting with advertising supported downloads. This news comes nearly one month after the initial release of the Entertainment Network, a possible sign of failure.'The ad-supported model is currently being tested on episodes by the video gamers network G4, but is likely to be tested on episodes from other publishers in the future. The video ads are short video clips delivered by YuMe Networks, a company that is specialized in IP based video ads. YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi said that the company expects to deliver more user targeted video ads as soon as BitTorrent Inc. signs more deals with publishers that want to experiment with ad-supported downloads.'"
SellaBand uses a 'DRM-free and ad supported downloads' business model for their music. You can read how it works http://www.sellaband.com/site/how-it-works.html">h ere (steps 6-7):
That together with their crowdfunding business model to fund the recording will be the future I think, or at least will play a big role in it.
Please mod me only (+) Underrated or (-) Troll
Anyone else around here sick of all the ads we get bombarded with on a nearly constant basis?
Road signs, radio, tv, t-shirts, hell, even the back of police cars in some cities.
Personally i try to avoid doing businesses with companies that practice 'flooding advertisement'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Patch to bypass advertising to be released in about a week. Probably on Bittorrent.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The flaw in this logic is a failure to understand the success of the BitTorrent protocol. People use BitTorrent because they don't have the money to pay for the bandwidth to distribute what they are distributing because they don't have a revenue model.
However, if you have a half-decent revenue model, such as advertising, revenue easily offsets the bandwidth costs of distributing video from a central server over HTTP, so why put your users through the pain of having to install a piece of client software?
BitTorrent's problem is that anyone that can afford to pay them for their services can probably afford to distribute their content over HTTP from a centralized server, and why wouldn't they given the much lower barrier to entry for their users?
I had spoken with a friend about this sort of thing. I download tv shows because I don't want to watch tv shows on their schedule. And air times for shows are a constant battle of popularity. I don't even mind the commercials. I basically want the equivalent of free tivo. But all the TV shows are generally bittorrented without the commercials.
/easily/. So that advertisers will still pay to keep the show going as long as those who don't want to go through the fuss of dodging commercials will still sit through it.
However, the tv shows need ad-revenue to keep going, even if the could offer the episodes with commercials, they still need to keep cycling the commercials for a flow of revenue. Plus bandwidth problems if using direct downloads for HD quality episodes.
I hoped for something like this. I loathe the current internet-based offerings on the network websites. Small resolutions, and constant re-buffering and queuing the next clip.
I just wonder if they will be able to pull this off without having the commercials easily circumvented. I have no doubt that the commercials can be circumvented, the key word here is
So the users provide all the bandwidth, and BitTorrent Inc. keeps all the revenues? Great business model!
Entertainment is going to have to come up with SOME way to make money. TiVo has killed tv advertising. People (like me) don't want to pay for something like Television. I wouldn't mind a 2 minute commercial at the beginning of my LOST download if I could get it Legally, As fast (or faster) as i can through other means, and without commercials every 10 minutes.
Sounds like a sustainable formula to me. No DRM though, I want to be able to burn it onto a cd and watch it on my Tele, not just my small computer screen. Encode it in H.264, or DiVX or whatever is high quality.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
I've seen it twice already. First, in financial troubles, over the air TV broadcasters began to pack the transmission with endless and annoying advertisements. Here in Portugal the 3 major channels (RTP, SIC, TVI) use to roll out ads for 15, 20 minutes, for goodness sake! It is not that rare for people to forget completely what they were watching *, when zapping through the channels. That pushed a lot of people to cable, as initially they were mostly ad free and, thus, worth the price. But as budgets got short, spendings got high and greed kicked in, they began to pack paid channels (like AXN, History Channel and Discovery for instance) with publicity too, not in volume, but enough to annoy. At the same time, cable companies began to offer premium channels with less or no advertisement on them, but you have to pay extra to get them ...
Then, came the internet, and the most tech savvy people began to get access to what they want, ad free and faster than over the legal channels of distribution, going around the artificial international syndication delay, that used to be 12, even 18 months! Most people still don't have access to such goodies, but it is a matter of time until someone with guts and technology creates a high quality YouTube-like system for movies and series.
Trying to push advertisement to this internet target audience will not work, as getting rid of ads is one of the reasons people go to the internet to look for things. People would even pay for content, they do it every time by buying complete season DVDs (although 70/$60 is kinda bitter to shell out in a single season), as long as the price is not extortive. People will not pay $4 to rent an episode for 24 hours. They can buy the whole season for, let's say, $60, what in the average 22 episodes season + 8 extras mean that they can *own* the goddamn thing for $2/episode. People will not download it to watch ads, they can watch with ads TV already, without the hassle of having to download, or watch it without ads, jumping through a few hoops.
Bottom line is: sell an episode of a serie in an ITunes like system (preferentially without the DRM) for $ 0.99 (fixed price) and people will buy it. Better yet, along with the file transfer, let people watch what they bought in an YouTube style interface, so people don't need to bother with media players, codecs or moving the file around.
* By time I was writing this, I remembered I was watching my favorite soap opera ( gasp!) but the advertisement ran for so long that I completely forgot about it, and lost the whole second half. Damn.
advertising actually help bring down the price on many of the products
Not really - it merely shifts the costs, and costs more because of implementation expense. Advertising requires significant expenditure in the people who work in the field. That expense is borne out by the customer - as all expenses eventually are. Advertising is overhead. Overhead should always be minimized.
The ad-supported downloads don't even appear to be full episodes of the G4 shows, just segments. These are already available for free via G4's podcasts, so why in the world would anyone want to go through the trouble of downloading them over bittorrent?
Plus, to make matters worse, the download rate was only 65K/sec, which is pretty very slow for my internet connection. The video quality wasn't even that good, something that would have made the bittorrent.com version better than the podcast version.
Bittorrent.com really needs to stop treating their potential customers like idiots and offer some incentive to use their products instead of the competition. The fact that they use the bittorrent protocol should lower their costs on the bandwidth side, but it increases the complexity on the customer's side. They really need to do something to make up for that (much lower prices or extremely high quality).
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
The problem is that Madison avenue is focused on push advertising rather than pull.
Look at all the ads that are on YouTube as content and actively downloaded. Even on my PVR I rewind and watch again good commercials. The problem with advertising and IPTV is that they force stupid, annoying, and pointless ads in a shotgun fashion assuming a captive audience. Run creative ads and use search terms and the like to target them. I figure Google is going to clean up big time on this on YouTube very soon.
I'm a single guy who doesn't drive but loves anime. If they would kill all the car ads, and the tampon ads and run anime and asian film ads I'd be as happy as a clam, toss in a link to the online store or ticket purchase and I'd be even happier. My democracy player downloads these ads automatically.
In the same fashion NewType magazine runs a DVD in every issue which has about three single anime episodes and a pile of trailers. While it's effectively pure advertising, its one of the most popular features, and when they discontinued it, readers made them bring it back. I've ended up buying many entire series based on the previews on those disks. That's focused and effective advertising.
The most effective email advertising I've ever encountered is the favorites search option on eBay. I get emails on a regular basis for stuff I'm actively seeking. I read every email and end up purchasing a reasonable percentage of items.
I totally foresee a future in which bittorrent becomes the "mainstream" medium, television is rendered obsolete, and big-name television producers stop "broadcasting" shows, they just upload them to bittorrent -- with the commercial breaks put right into the video file.
As it is now, when people rip video from television and upload it, they take the time to remove the commercials -- because hey, you're already going to all of the trouble to rip it, upload it, and attach your name to it, why not make it quality? Pirating is all about your rep.
But if the producers just played into the torrent fad, then no one would have to rip the videos themselves -- and since the videos are being handed to people on a silver platter, my guess is that no one would bother to take the time to recut the video to be commercial-free and upload it again to another torrent (which would be illegal and probably have less seeds/leeches as a result). Of course, people would probably be quite likely to skip the commercials while watching, but whether or not they skip them would probably depend on the product being advertised -- a commercial would probably have about 5 seconds to grab the viewer's attention, lest it be skipped. Since you're uploading these programs to the internet (and don't have to deal with the cable provider), you can pick and choose your own targeted advertising ... I wonder how advertising for shows gets
picked now?
Also, it isn't as if people don't "skip" the commercials on television already -- they walk away to use the bathroom, get something to eat, or even just change the channel until the commercials are over.
Doesn't this sound like a win-win situation? The consumers get the product for free, whenever they want it, and the producers reach a MUCH larger audience with their advertising (thereby increasing advertising revenues -- also, since the popularity of a torrent can easily be gauged by keeping track of how many people have/are downloading it, the popularity of a torrent could become the new "ratings" system, determining how valuable getting commercials onto that file would be for an advertiser).
One final thing, I wonder how much cheaper it would be to upload a TV show onto bittorrent than it would be to get it on a cable channel? I don't know all of the specifics, but it seems totally feasible that the television producers could make more money than they do now by using free torrents to distribute their shows -- even while providing the product for free! After all, free product = more users = better advertising profits.
PS Sorry about double-posting, I tend to forget paragraph tags when I'm excited about an idea.
From here: http://www.gaebler.com/Television-Advertising-Cost s.htm
"For example, a 30-second spot during the 2005 Superbowl sold for $2.4 million. Commercials during less-watched programs are more affordable, but the cost of those commercials may still run in excess of $100,000 per 30-seconds."
About 95 million people watched the Superbowl. That would seem to put it at much less than $1/viewer, or about 2.5 cents (1.25p in real money). Considering they want to charge a few pounds per program...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.