Slashdot Mirror
Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players
Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."
That will kill self-made videos in no time. Who really wants to wait through a 3 minute ad for tampons to watch a 2 minute rambing of a camwhore? I certainly don't want to do that.
Not that I care, I have put exactly one video of on youtube. I just had a dash of inspiration. Probably will never happen again.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
...but they can't enforce upgrades. I for one simply won't be installing this on my computer.
that still doesn't prevent me from closing my eyes!
Why would anyone buy advertisements that they knew could be easily bypassed? I don't think we'll end up with a scenario where you have a 2 minute clip that has 2 minutes of advertisement. More like you watch a music video, you see a 30 second ad beforehand.
I really hate companies that spend so much effort on trying to make me do stuff they know I don't want to do. These big media companies already have nearly every dollar that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison managed to miss; how come they need mine?
.nosig
Meanwhile, the right edge of the text of this story is covered by the Flash ad (Sun anniversary pricing) next to it. So perhaps the Slashcode authors have prior art.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Suddenly I feel strong urge to support Free Software
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
Youtube and youtube clones.
What is the point? Are they going to force us to become consumers of the advertised products too?
What ever happened to the idea of targeting willing people? I'm not interested in whatever you want to sell me, so don't waste your time or mine forcing me to watch an advertisement. If anything, you'll make me less likely to purchase whatever it is you want me to buy.
If people were interested, they would watch the ads and make careful decisions. Yet, some people seem to think that we need to be strapped to chairs and have our eyes forced open to watch Big Brother ala 1984 tell us the "Good News" of whatever it is that Big Corp. wants to sell me.
allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts
Coming soon, to a codec pack near you:
FlashAlternative.
I give it 48 hours after initial release before a patch to bypass the ads is released online.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Fine, then I do not want to watch the content at all. I am willing to be lots of other people feel the same way. And considering the scale of amateur content production these days, I think there is plenty of room and sponsorship for alternative sites.
Why bother.
I can't be the only one who despises the use of Flash on these video sites. Apart from the fact that my primary OS doesn't support Flash, I hate Flash players out of principle. There are such better, more universal video formats out there, I just can't understand why the hell these sites convert the videos to such a crap format.
Method of processing duck feet
This will be cracked as swiftly as the wind blows.
...Will it work in Linux? Seriously, I'm really sick of Adobe's neglect of linux users. Let's hope this doesn't break the Linux Flash 9 plug-in for sites that use the ads.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
That's the approach i took to network television.
10% ad load is not so bad (say 10 seconds for a 100 second video). That's what the ad load was like for television back in the 1950's and 1960's.
Advertisers have pushed it way past 33%. In some cases the ad load is almost 50%.
How can they even expect us to bother wading through 50% ads to get to content?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
As a result of that decision, though, I tend to not visit sites that rely heavily on flash. For instance, I still us Yahoo finance instead of Google finance. Due to historical reasons, flash used to crash my browser often, I did not install flash for the longest time, and now only do so in conjunction with blocker software. This of course reduces the ad revenue of the web sites I visit, as I use very weak ad blocking software, but never see the flash ads. I see most of the static image ads, and all the text ads.
I had hoped that the Adobe acquisition might mean that Flash might become a better citizen, for instance including an option of load and run flash only with user consent, much like we can still do with images and gif animation. Instead we still see Flash used as an advertising and porn delivery system, which is profitable, but hardly consistent with the Adobe's core business.
Another example of good technology, bad delivery. Like the laser disk.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Did you happen to buy in when Circuit City was hawking Divx ?
Spelling, grammar, punctuation? We need something that checks logic.
"It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming"
-Jamie Kellner, CEO of Turner Broadcasting
Sidenote: what does "watch the button" mean here?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Ok, Flash is dead, what's the alternative?
Bonus question for 100 bucks: When you force user A, using product B, to do things he doesn't want to do while there are a billion alternatives for B, will user A keep using product B?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Translation: "I've decided to become part of the problem."
It's can't last forever, at some point in a capitalist society people need to make a profit.
Who said anything about capatilism? Last I checked we lived in a socialist state. After all... In a true capitalist free market, it wouldn't be illegal to bypass DRM and companies wouldn't get paid anything unless they actually made a sale rather than tax compensation for "theoretical losses" due to piracy.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Just a few posts in and already people are spelling doom for youtube and the like. What's odd is that people think this somehow requires you to put an add on your home grown video blog if you use flash, which is ridiculous. This is basically an opt in system. If you want DRM and an ad on your video content, you can do so. Adobe is wooing the media companies with features they want. This isn't for anyone who doesn't want to use DRM, and you should be able to easily turn it off.
What this basically does is make it harder to copy your favorite clips from the daily show and late night with david letterman to Youtube very quickly. Now, you have to be a cracker who breaks the DRM and THEN posts it to Youtube.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Ok, so even if it gets adopted on some of the bigger sites, people will just run away from them to some other, more free alternatives. Great job, ad-guys, you've just lost your big user-base. People who push stuff like this have, and i quote, "no fucking clue". First they should pull their heads out of their asses, then try to think of a way of either making old media more attractive to the general consumer, or harnessing the internet's potential in some other, non-invasive way. Although for me, they should just wither off and die.
(Sorry for angry tone, I'm just tired of things like this.)
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Who hasn't been making a profit?
Last time I copied a DVD, the electric utility made a profit off me, my ISP made a profit off me, the blank DVD manufacturer made a profit off me, the big box store where I bought the blank DVDs made a profit off me, the DVD case manufacturer made a profit off me (as, again, did the big box store), my computer manufacturer and DVD writer companies made a profit off me when I bought the hardware to do this, my operating system vendor made a profit off me, and the ad-supported web site hosting the software I used made a profit off me.
They'd make even more profit off me if they'd make new hardware with the features I want, namely, copyability.
They just released the native port for Linux and now Slashdot announces that Flash is dead.
Youtube is one of the few places that make use of Flash for something more relevant than commercials.
Refuse to use. Walk away and don't use it.
Let the rebels of the world invent something better that's free and non oppressive.
Sooner or later people with decide enough is enough but they better make it sooner while they still can.
Time for a pitchfork and torch rally up to the mountain...
Adding DRM to off-line viewing of videos is new, but for the typical scenario of online viewing of Flash videos via a Flash player embedded in a HTML page, the ability to force ad viewing is nothing new. It's always been easy to roll a Flash video play that doesn't allow skipping or scrubbing through the video ad, but then enables that feature once the main video begins. Many sites that feature Flash video do exactly that.
This doesn't take care of ad "previews" on the rare flash you may actually want to see, but nobody is forcing to to watch it.
I've been using Flashblock for several years myself but recently stopped putting it on new machines. While I am annoyed that about five percent of Flash ads somehow get past Flashblock, the real issue is how many sites are Flash-heavy now. It isn't uncommon for me to browse to a site and see five or six boxes with an arrow (indicating blocked Flash content), most or all of which are legitimate content and not annoying ads. I've never found Flashblock's whitelist to work properly either.I now use Adblock Plus with the Filterset.G updater and skip Flashblock altogether. I still block the annoying ads but don't have to deal with a dozen right-clicks per page just to view a site.
As a web developer all i can say is this.
Read radical news here
I'm paying the cable bill so why don't I get a cut?
/. and I couldn't get rid of them, I'd drop /. too.
I don't watch YouTube much (about three times so fa I think). Ads like this would stop me cold. If they turned up on
The YouTube-ization of web content is an affront to user interface design, not to mention the underlying framework of the www. Ever go to a web page with six or seven auto-loading videos? Yikes. To make things worse, if you leave the page and come back the videos load all over again, because they are not cached. Talk about unnecessary use of bandwidth.
And the players themselves, ugh. Notice how they all look like the QuickTime or Windows Media players, but the controls don't really work? Try and fast forward or reverse reverse playback. Sometimes the play/pause barely work. The Flash video players have the familiar video controls, but they're quite often no better than fake plastic ones glued to the screen.
That kind of forced content inside interactive viewers will likely force a resurgence in Java player applets. Of course DRM applets can be written and published, but it won't be mandatory. If the video content is in an open format, then the player must enforce the DRM, which the publisher of the applet can decide for themself. If the content is in some proprietary format, it will not be as popular as content in an open format.
I just wish that Java would let me cache the applet fingerprint, so I can pull it from cache instead of downloading the identical one from each website publishing it.
All it will take will be YouTube to switch for the Flash version to get punched back into serving consumers. And if not YouTube, then it opens a competitive advantage for a new contender to come out of nowhere like YouTube did.
This Net video wave is just getting started. Consumers are more empowered to demand our interests be protected than ever before, in part because of the interactive video networks we've already got. We can get this thing right from the beginning, if we work together.
--
make install -not war
The way you worship capitalism like that makes it as dangerous to liberty as communism was to those who worshipped that. There is nothing wrong with free. Most people are unwilling to 'pay' (in time or money) for crap, which is 98% of the flash content on the net these days... If people have to sit through ads to watch shoddy homemade videos on youtube, that will nix whatever limited interest they had in the video in the first place. However, all hope is not lost. This should spawn a greater demand for a flash alternative that does what the user wants instead of what the 'content provider' wants. Another alternative is simply not to use flash as a container. There are plenty of other preexisting standards for embedded video which work much better and aren't platform dependent.
Advertising is killing itself off. Because society is so inundated with it, the S/N ratio is hitting record lows, and as advertisers become more audacious in their attempts to grab your attention, the higher the probability that you will be annoyed with instead of interested in the product. Excessive advertising is one of the strongest examples of business run amok.
You're missing the point: This is about tacking ads you don't want to see to a flash file you do want to see. If you want to see the video, you'll have to swallow a dose of ads. No ads, no video.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
takes five seconds to find another web site and click over, screw you, dudes.
it's now time for the market to test this. users won't buy it, then adobe and the web sites that put this silly slop into play will be branded as total assholes in no time.
let the marketplace work....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Adobe enjoyed it's time as the new internet video player.
Every time you see a forced ad, write the company advertising and tell them you will no longer buy their product.
If enough people do this, then it will go away.
The "free market" works when consumers view themselves as citizens instead of sheep.
I wonder if he thinks I'm breaking some sort of contract in his head because I never so much as channel surf past his network, much less ever stop there.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So here's the riddle. If a content provider wants to force you to use adverts, they will force you - Gnash won't help. If they don't want to force you, Gnash is unnecessary. So what, exactly, does this have to do with...well...anything?
Flash can be great, Flash can be horrible, it depends on what and how something is delivered. Flash has always left a bad taste for web developers and many end users, but nothing to threaten the format, till now?
The only way Flash will go away is by people not watching whatever is delivered through that medium. Be it through blocking the technology or using another, voting with your dollar is what decides how these formats will survive. When I read this, I tend to think that this will only serve to bother people; bother people like pop-ups did/do; bother them enough to block the ads. We all know the results of pop-up blockers, it is way less pop-ups to block. If that happens to Flash, it will likely be an reversible trend. Think about it, once you start blocking something, even partially, what are the chances you ever lift that block? Any damage Adobe causes with this, might be reversible.
Thoughts?
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I, for one, welcome our new flash-based ad-forcing video overlords...
(Makes me sick)
I think they need to really focus on the 5 second ad. Nobody will bother bypassing it. On TV, it would not even be worth skipping over with Tivo. People's attention span always seems to be getting shorter anyway.
They could provide a hot-link or "add to favorites" capability for the people who want to learn more.
Enforced advertisements are shit. I recently rented the "Man of the Year" DVD only to be forced to watch a long narrative about how wonderful HD-DVD is going to be, followed by forced-previews. To add insult to injury, I only watched half the first night and had to sit through the f*cking ads a second time before I could watch the rest.
I don't hate ads though, just being forced to watch them (especially ads that suck). Hell, I have several hundred megs of downloaded advertisements... the ones that are actually quite funny/amusing. Every now and then I shared them with my friends.
I also had somebody recently show me a clip of some type of "ad awards." It's about 1h30 long, and it's *all* ads. I only had time to catch about 30 minutes of it, but I just about wet myself laughing at some of the better ones
The solution here is not to make ads the consumer can't skip... that just pisses the consumer of. The solution is to make ads that the consumer *WANTS* to watch... the type that has somebody yelling across the room "hey Bob, get back here quick, that new Bud Light commercial I was telling you about is coming on"
NO ADOBE! Just no! How on earth do you expect to beat the latest "Microsoft release *PRODUCT HERE* killer! *SOFTWARE COMPANY* are panicing" release by alienating your userbase? Just to make a quick buck? Very very naughty.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Seriously. The major reason DRM sucks is not because it's a risk to our freedom or anything, but rather because it's such a useless, unnecessary waste of resources. How long do you think it will take Adobe's player to get cracked once it gets released in the wild and on a popular site where people care about cracking it? Maybe a day?
Don't forget your ears. Plug them to ignore the audio too. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Adobe isn't going to force everyone to watch ads. They are doing exactly what a lot of their customers are asking for. People who are creating their own video casts (merlin mann for example) may want to monetize their videocasts by adding sponsorship to their videos. This allows people to redistribute their content much easier and still guarantee that their sponsors are being seen. Currently, the average video blogger/caster doesn't have a lot of resources for managing this themselves. (adding video to the beginning of the video file) Think about it. A video blogger will be able to change their sponsors without reprocessing their videos. Seems reasonable to me.
Robby Russell
PLANET ARGON
Robby on Rails
What I find more troubling than this is that now Adobe completely controls the design industry. As a designer every application I use is developed by Adobe. Well, excluding Microsoft Office which is a necessity in my business.
Adobe is already showing what sort of company they are with the release of their very first suite since the acquisition of Macromedia. Their software has gotten significantly more expensive, it's overloaded with bloat and they've managed to outdo Microsoft with all the versions of their software. An Adobe representative, addressing criticisms of a $500 increase in one of the packages, essentially said that people will pay the extra money because they're Adobe. The gist of it is that we're paying more because we've got no choice. If I could find the link I'd post it here.
Unfortunately, designers by and large aren't particularly savvy. They're the kind of people to constantly criticize Microsoft just because it's trendy but then happily bend over for Adobe and Apple. So I doubt this will ever change.
People like to point out alternatives to Adobe products, but they forget some basic points. Compatibility is essential. I can't go off and use my own software only to not have clients or other designers not be able to handle my files. It's already bad enough with Adobe forcing companies to upgrade by limiting compatibility between versions. I may not have problems 90% of the time, but that 10% that trouble arises is a huge deal in my business. So I have to go with what everyone else is using.
And another fact is that despite the bloat present in current Adobe products their software is still reasonable well designed and works seamlessly. I can't say that about anything else I've tried. And most others are even worse with bloat trying to cram all these pointless features into the application. But the biggest problem I've encountered is that they all have poorly designed interfaces.
Despite it's problems Flash is an excellent tool. It runs well on most systems. There might be a person or two who's running a system that doesn't support it. But to criticize something because it doesn't support 1% or 2% of the market is a bit ridiculous to be honest. The fact is that on any platform that supports Flash it's a guarantee that in almost every single case the application is going to be identical. It's going to look the same and it's going to run exactly the same way. You can't really say the same thing about Java or anything else. I don't have to worry about supporting specific platforms. I build something once and I'm done.
I do welcome competitors, however. I'm not happy with the direction Adobe is heading in. and this nonsense of enforced advertising is just one of many problems. I fully expect this sort of thing to become prevalent whether we like it or not. Because, like I've already mentioned, Adobe now has a monopoly over the design industry. And every marketing company out there is without a doubt eager to cram advertising down our collective throats.
New punctuation update "~" (no quotes) at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. ~
Just because the technology is available doesn't mean it will be adopted.
If YouTube started displaying forced ads before their user-made videos, something tells me they'd have very sudden and very large drop in market share. It would then be in someone else's interest to start up a site without ads.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
This is much ado about nothing. The reason they can make you watch an ad before the video plays is that the Flash format is a virtual machine, not just a video format. This has been possible for as long as Flash has been around, and if YouTube had wanted to do something like this there has been nothing stopping them. It sounds like this product is just a common API or a new content creation UI that doesn't require Flash or Flex.
Mochi Media has been offering a service for ads like this for the past 5 months, but it's being used mostly for casual games.
[makes mental note not to update Flash anymore]
I hope the web spiders enjoy these new ads, since they'll be the only visitors..
Seriously, as someone who has purchased advertising in the past, until they figure out a way to force you into actually purchasing something, that type of advertising makes me run away screaming.
It was exactly these types of tricks that made me change my mind about paying for advertising. I don't want any visitors if they were tricked.
Not once has an advertisement resulted in an actual purchase. Any agency that does this will soon find their revenue sources drying up as advertisers (such as myself) jump ship.
Blatant spam would be more effective.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but seriously, I do not get what is with all the bitching and moaning about *GASP* having to watch ads before you view some video content.
First, a lot of websites like ESPN and CNN already do this, so this I fail to see how this is big news.
Second, how is this different from TV?
Third, as much as we would like to ignore it, maintaining a websites and producing content cost money. Even good old Slashdot relies on ad revenue to stay afloat. Like TV, the only other choice we have is a pay-for-content scheme, and personally, I'd rather deal with ads then have to maintain subscriptions to the 20 or so websites I visit regularly. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Here's some advice for you ad-challenged people. Get Adblock; it blocks 90% of the ads you'll ever have the potential to see. For the other 10%, just ignore them or surf another website until they are over. You may be forced to sit through the ad, but your not forced to pay attention to it.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Heavens no! Now I will have to open the video in one tab, switch to another tab and keep reading slashdot, and switch back to the video when the adverts are over.
At least television shows don't have scenes anymore where the characters turn to the camera to pitch products directly. It's one thing for a character to be holding a can of {brand name soda} so that the label can be clearly seen, but product placement used to be much worse.
This poster has it right - this has nothing to do with the content creators, and everything to do with the content providers. YouTube et al must be drooling at the prospect of making you watch ads for content they get for free...
Journalism requires money to pay for bandwidth and salaries for reporters, editors etc. Although many aspects of DRM are problematic, especially with entertainment, some balance must be achieved between the need of news gathering organizations' need to create revenue and the public's access to good journalism. Paper advertising (how the NYT and others fund much of their web production), foundation funding / individual contributions (think PBS) and taxes (BBC) can only go so far. I anticipate a lot of dogmatic rejection of reasonable advertising schemes in this thread. I think it is detrimental to solving the larger question of how we will get decent coverage of world news in the long run.
The sacred and the propane
There are those of us who refuse to indulge in mass-stupidity. I want text-based information at my fingertips, not animated migraine-inducing bullshit.
Frankly the "cult of free" generation is coming to an end. We've had it easy for quite a while - free software(free like mp3's and Public radio - not like free beer) free movies - free everything. It's can't last forever, at some point in a capitalist society people need to make a profit.
The only way you can get all this stuff for FREE is if you're going through your neighbor's open WiFi. Remember that usually people pay a monthly fee for internet access. The host of your favorite website pays even more depending on bandwidth. Nothing has ever been FREE, troll. The thing is some people want to make a few billion and be the next Google, and they're not afraid to degrade the quality of our browsing to do it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I recently installed Ubuntu on my fathers new machine. He was very pleased with it, but disappointed that he couldn't watch youtube anymore. I guess he is booting into windows to do that. In theory it might be possible to use nspluginwrappers to use 32 bit firefox plugins on his 64 bit machine, but in practice that would mean that I need to invest a couple of hours to install (and cleanup after his failed attempts). Getting these extra flavour things to run was a bit of a disappointment, I though Ubuntu took care of everything...
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Windows. QED.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Flash Uninstaller for Windowsr rent/uninstall_flash_player.exe
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/cu
FlashBlock for FireFox
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
So much FUD going on here; where to begin...
For the record, I don't like where this is headed, because DRM in the Flash Player itself is only a matter of time IMO, but the article and the /. are very misleading about what's actually being released. Adobe announced the Adobe Media Player today - NOT a new version of the browser-based Flash plug-in/player. The software is a desktop application that is being built on top of Apollo, and it is the software itself which will support the DRM that will allow either pay-for-play content (like iTunes store purchases), as well as ads and branding that can't be separated from the video clip. Big media companies will be the ones tying ads to content - individuals can target the player and not have any ads or DRM at all, so your Aunt Sue's cooking show (or whatever) will be provided unlocked, free and clear. Basically, the software works as an RSS aggregator. It won't even be released for a while, and when the time comes, if you don't want it, don't download it and don't use it. Plain and simple. And geez - if you own a video site, you can already force ads on Flash Video viewers right now if you want to, and many places do. Flash streaming has been a pseudo-DRM format unto itself for a while now. Just because the technology will be there doesn't mean independent and individual producers have to use it - it's not the Zune we're talking about here.
Read Adobe's official release and decide for yourself. The lack of detail in the source article is ridiculous.
And the point is that forced advertising sucks, as does any technology that fosters it.
The Flash video players have the familiar video controls, but they're quite often no better than fake plastic ones glued to the screen.
Those are fake?!! I'm gonna get those pesky kids!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Damn skippy. I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but why is it that people think things like the FOSS movement is "communist" while "capitalism" means "the government guarantees profitability"? Companies like Redhat and Google (both FOSS contributers) are capitalistic, ie they make profits by charging for a service. Record labels, on the other hand, rely on government intervention (i.e. "copyright" and "patents") in order to make a profit.
The last I heard, capitalism implied that the government did not control nor interfere with the market. Copyright and patents were invented as a system to encourage certain kinds of development. In effect, they're the same sort of system as giving federal grants to artists. "Copyright" is a socialist idea-- forcing people to pay for a service that's already been done in order to support an industry that the government wishes to prop up.
And since those industries which rely on intellectual property are socialist industries whose purpose is to serve the common good, we have no debt to them when they cease fuctioning in that capacity.
So in the future we will not have browsers that simply block (not load) ads, we will have video players that *load* ads and then "play" them, silently, and in some background window, and tell you after two minutes that "your movie is now ready for viewing". Awesome!
One of the biggest clients in the Flashmedia server are pr0n / live webcam providers.
Not being able to capture streams is a huge advantage to attrack one-time models who don't wish to be haunted by that ghost.
Then again, pr0n companies usually don't run Windoze; it can't handle the traffic at peak hours, hard and expensive to operate.
So it won't be a quick adoption...
Betamax.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I still don't understand why this industry tries to force this crap on people.
Why don't they *try* puting adds on regular streaming videos first and see if people watch them? I guarentee there will be more effort to crack this form of DRM just because it's forced.
They might be surprised that people realy don't care that much about commercials. Plenty of people watch commercials on TV when they could mute them or do something else. But as soon as you try to *force* someone to watch something, they sure as hell are not going to think favorably about you, and just might find a way around it.
I always wondered if someone were to host their show/movie on a bittorrent site with a couple commercials in it. Would people go to the trouble of remastering the video, removing the commercials, and post a new torrent? or would they just watch it as is? It would be a currious experiment.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
5 secs is a little short unless it's a mostly static image with a few words, but 10 is quite reasonable. TV networks already have 15 second spots. 30 seconds to a minute for a 2 - 5 minute clip is WAY too long.
You bought the DVD; it's not an ad-supported medium. Your analogy falls apart...
Don't be surprised when the next spec of HDMI/HDCP requres monitors to sense the presence of people.
Movies could be bundled with DRM that limits viewers to 4 and would shut off the display if a group
of 6 people were sensed. Youtube could require the display to sense the presence of a person during
the ad or the video won't play. No more reaching for a snack while the ad plays!
You read it here on Slashdot first!
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
$ sudo pkg_delete -v linux-flashplugin9
Screw 'em!
Caveat Utilitor
Actually, Microsoft just announced (today or yesterday) to come with a similar offering. They have copied^W developed^W ... whatever, they come out with a new Flash 'killer'.
Some of the greatest features that Adobe doesn't have in Flash is DRM and forced ads for their consumers (that's literally what the post on another news site said). It's also slightly cheaper (if you don't count the licensing costs for Longhorn and SQL Server (required)).
Really, who's not waiting for MORE DRM?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
is right here
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
As I continue to say in situations like this, this isn't a problem if you don't have Flash installed. They can't force you to watch something if you can't see it in the first place.
Just another reason not to have Flash on you ones system.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I thought the integration of the flash player and sudden swap to raw flv format was designed to be "drm".
i mean, they not only separate the video from the player.swf, but also currently obscure the video content as much as possible with spidering. the only reason i'm able to fish it out is because the "activity" window in safari gives me filesizes, and the video stream is pretty obvious when its the only file over 1MB in size.
so now i guess all these sites will incorporate encryption, but i give it about a week before there are flash drm cracking tools for every os with more than 5000 worldwide users.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
the point of separating the video from the players is to make it as hard as possible to leech the videos from websites, not to provide you with more controls.
that obviously didnt work, as there are leech extensions for firefox, so now theyre going to encrypt it with drm too.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Like when the Dreamweaver installer suddenly got an unannounced flash install with no pesky prompts to stop it.
Or like a couple of versions of Dreamweaver continued some old bugs, add lots of new cold fusion goodness and failed to add a single new thing for php or asp scripting. In fact some would argue Dreamweaver never got the backend support that the venerable old ultradev had, and we barely got anything but lots of new support for Macromedia's new proprietary acquisitions.
Anyone who pointed out this behavior was similar to MS jamming proprietary stuff down your throat would get slammed by the MM defenders. Adobe probably thought they had a willing market of sheep in that acquisition.
video sharing sites dont produce the content, they have no right to butcher it by forcing people to watch ads.
if theyre going to do that, then they need to be splitting the revenue 50/50 with the actual creator of the video, be happy with their current revenues, or be abandoned in droves when they try this crap.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
How does passing laws make you socialist? A government by definition enforces laws whether you are capitalist or not.
If it wasn't for regulation of the airwaves we'd have multiple broadcasters on the same frequencies also. I'd rather have some regulation.
I've had it with Flash anyway - that involuntary CPU-killing bandwidth sucking abortion. I go to a webpage and 5 instances of flash fire up, 2 of which use my connection to stream video while the others display supercomplex animated scenes that murder anything older than a year.
Screw flash. Any site that requires it is dead to me.
Well, it won't take me long to decide whether to view those or not..
Am I the only one that hates the move to video everywhere on the Internet? If I wanted video, I would watch TV. I get news from the Internet because I can at a glance decide which item I want more information on, of the dozens of items listed, and I can skim it or look through the whole thing based on my interest. With video, you lose all that. And, on the odd occasion I do check the video, I'm shocked at the low quality people are willing to put up with.
When I go to cnn.com, half the stories linked there are to videos. If I go to espn.com, it automatically loads a video advertisement and starts playing it (don't check espn.com at work, the audio blasting from your PC alerts everyone within 30 feet that you're goofing off). A good percentage of the links at digg.com are video (and a high percentage of the rest is garbage).
No thanks. I already use flashblock, to avoid most videos and advertisements. I also changed my site viewing habits to avoid primarily video sites.
pardon me, but if youtube places drm on anything uploaded to their website, they can force traffic to their site by blocking those flv file saver extensions.
thus, this is the end of flash.. I know i will refuse to even click links to sites which prevent me from actually saving the videos i see.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I can't even stand the 30 sec commercials they use on the big network news sites. When I see that lame ass camera icon next to a story link, I move on to something else.
Blar.
Does an ad BEFORE the main program count the same as one during the program? Does a commercial break count the same as a flash commercial? How about a commercial shown DURING the program (seen them on US tv rips, an ad graphic blocking about half the screen).
Oh and in holland, when I was young, there were NO commercials on sunday. There are now. So at least in this little country ad length has gone up by a gazillion percent on sunday.
The most notably side-effect of ads on sunday is that classic cartoons like bug bunny are no longer aired as often to fill out the the couple of minutes that were left in an hour were the american shows tend to have commercials. Yes, kids, back in the day we had our tv programs run non-stop, and at the beginning and the end, there was a cartoon.
Rose colored glasses you say? Ain't that hard, when things were indeed rosey.
As a downside, we only had the one tv station back then. In holland if you wanted two tv stations, you watched a foreign channel, british, german or belgian depending on were you lived.
Ah, good days. Funny, I watched more tv when there was one station then now that I got over 20.
Odd eh.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Someone comes up with a new idea, builds a site, popularity explodes, someone tries to control and monetize it (either the original owner or someone who bought it for way too much money), the attempts at control end up smothering the product, popularity declines, someone comes up with another new idea, and so on."
Funny how that works out.
What does a tv-station, or anyone supplying content payed for by ads sell. Answer, ads.
Slashdot itself does NOT sell you newsstories. How could they, the service is free. Rather they sell advertising to people selling a product.
Now who does the ads. Who tells a company what ad policy to follow. An ad agency offcourse. What do they sell? The product of whoever hires them you say? Don't be silly, ad agencies sell ads.
A plastic surgeon sells plastic surgery, NOT health. They will therefore ALWAYS find something wrong with the way you look, because improving your looks is what they sell.
Offcourse surgeons have got somekind of oath, but ad agencies do not.
They want to sell their product and will ADVERTISE to do so. The problem is that ad agencies are very good at selling ads, it is after all their core business. Sadly their customers, to whom ads are NOT their core business, are not to good at it.
The first mistake is to convuse adversting with factual data. If you read about some new ad method, or direct marketing research, remember that this is ADVERTISING for ads.
I could be an honest plastic surgeon, and tell you you are ugly to the bone and no amount of cutting is going to improve it. The truth BUT I would not be making any money of you.
I could be an honest ad seller, and tell you your product just isn't wanted and trying to get more people to buy it is just not going to happen. The truth BUT I would not be making any money of you.
Remember, that almost all research being done on the effectivness off ads is being done by the ad agencies themselves OR companies closely related to them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There seems to be some consensus here that Youtube will self-destruct if it imposes forced ads on its viewers. I guess however, given the nature of many Youtube videos, that a significant part of their audience is from the MTV "2 scenes a second w/ads every third frame" generation, and I doubt they'll stop watching (or whatever you call their gazing at the tube).
Why do media companies feel that it's a requirement of operation to piss off their customers as much as absolutely possible? The minute I run across a DVD player that doesn't allow disabling controls, I'm buying it, and if I know ahead of time that a DVD includes forced commercials, I'm going to put off buying it. In the meantime, I'll use the same technique I used before I had Tivo: the mute button. They can't get to my receiver... I refuse to downgrade to iTunes 7, and I won't install this new flash player either. A pain, but not as painful as the crap they're trying to foist on us.
Will this make it harder for Ebaum's World to misattribute content?
Speaking of such things, I horrified a friend by bringing up the idea of "live ads." You arrive at a web page, and there's video of someone sitting patiently. They sit up and say "hi there" and start talking to you.. then you realize.. the reason they're encouraging you to click on an "interact" button is.. they're live! Aaaggh. It'll be the end.
You missed the proper emphasis in this, which is, "will allow websites... to force ads"...
/. reaction on this one.
Are you suggesting that people providing video shouldn't be *allowed* to put advertising into it?
Put another way... are you suggesting that someone creating content shouldn't have a say in deciding how it's used? (e.g., "I worked hard on this video, I want to get paid for it, and getting advertisers seems like the best way...")
Or perhaps you feel it's your right to be able to watch any form of media without payment of any form?
No, really, I'd love to hear the explanation for the
Now, I simply don't install Flash.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
What if a MAJOR CORPORATION like, say, Sony or Disney were to, um, realease their video content to the web and, well, sell some ads with it.
1) Do you think they could make money? I mean, seeing as how the ads are turned on by force?
2) Would that hurt GooTube?
3) Is the condecending irony too thick on this post?
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Now, I simply don't install Flash.
I did that for a while, but got tired of being prompted to install Flash every 2.3 seconds."But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital restrictions management (DRM) -- allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying."
There, corrected it for you. Copyright was never about making the reader jump through hoops in order to access the material. This is not about rights.
We're so used to the learned helplessness tied to our instant gratification culture that we hardly even remark on excessive claims such as this one. There's a little box marked x in the window frame. Click on it. If you survive the momentary frission of gratification denied, Adobe and Apple and Viacom and other powers of mind control can't force anything upon you at all.
I wish this message was a funny one
Record from TV, cut out commercials, burn to disk for pleasurable viewing.
I buy movies, but I rip them and modify so the menu comes up as soon as the disk is spun up, and the movie plays without the assinine anti-piracy shit. I paid my money, I'm not going to be lectured every time I watch a movie.
In fact, I'm starting to get into downloaded movies...for many of these reasons. If I pay $25.00 for a DVD I don't want to be lectured every time I watch it. I want to stick the disk in and within seconds see the movie begin playing.
I guess I'm greedy.
Blar.
The industry has totally lost touch with the artistic creators and the consumers. Artists have been getting screwed for years. But with the spread of blogs, e-mail, and searches music fans begin to spread the word themselves about good content. When peer-to-peer networks came about we began to distribute files ourselves; why waste the time of burning a cd, packing shipping, storing, selling, buying, unwrapping, and playing a cd when at a fraction of the cost you can download it directly. With new services like Strayform artists and fans can now fund, distribute, and advertise without need of corporate middlemen. I think we are going to get tired of putting up with ads, DRM, lawsuits and start cutting out the corporate middlemen totally.
Forced adverts are on the way out. This just shows that people are trying to maintain the status-quo. They need to keep up with the times.
Personally I advocate the boycotting of any company product that is shown by forced adverts, especially in this medium.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
http://www.megat.co.uk/wrong/wrong.php?r=cft&n=Fre ezeS&c=%23FF0000&t=Advertising
For your convenience, I have highlighted the brain malfunction(s) that
most closely resemble(s) the one(s) you recently made on the topic of Advertising.
I am the World
Example: I don't listen to country music. Therefore, country music is not popular.
Generalizing from Self
Example: I'm a liar. Therefore, I don't believe what you're saying.
Faulty Pattern Recognition
Example: His last six wives were murdered mysteriously. I hope to be wife number seven.
i can't wait to skip the ads and not watch the videos along with them. I do have a choice after all. i wonder if anyone remembers that as well. i've lived this long without watching youtube/random whatever vids online. i can continue to make it I think.
"When they say it's not about the money, IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY." The sad truth is that news and other content isn't supported by ads, the ads are supported by the content. For the younger crowd, check out Merchants of Cool: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool / and for the older crowd, read I Was a Junket Whore http://www.ericdsnider.com/snide/i-was-a-junket-wh ore/. The big stir in the media industries these days isn't in that they fear the internet for being able to deliver content in the way that the consumer want (and therefore lose content control), but in that it's taking their advertising income. Look at any newsstand magazine - nearly half of it's page space is ads. The thing that always bothers me is that we pay to receive this stuff... we pay for our televisions, cable, satellite, computer, and our cell phone connection. We pay to be blasted by advertising and then let these big media conglomerates tell us how to use what we pay for. It falls back that one of the best ways to make money is not to offer a product, but to offer a service. Media outlets are simply services for advertisers.
Which might be great for artists, who then can not only distribute their music videos, but turn a profit through advertisement.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Yahoo's video site does pre-roll ads, 30sec ad before watching an video. You then get to watch 2 videos again before seeing another ad, even if you don't watch all of either one, as soon as you picked a 3rd video another 30sec ad shows. In my opinion it makes the site unusable, I will never use Yahoo's Video site again, I only tried it out to see what they did and if anything was better than YouTube. People don't go online to watch 30+min of video or 2+hrs like TV or watch the full 2minute video segments. Imagine if you had to watch a commercial every time you changed the channel more than 3 times or after every 4 minutes.
They don't have a way to enforce ads on books...yet.
What's with this people? Why do they hate us so much?
Sorry Jamie Kellner...
Nobody able to will watch interrrupt-driven, ad-supported broadcast TV in ANY form in real time anymore as it is a royal waste of time!
And pitchmen like Billy Mays just make advertising as a for-profit communications medium worse!
The way I see it, the TV ad industry at large can do one of 3 things in their struggle to remain relavent and in busines.
1) Give up and go out of business. This should drastically lower the costs of goods and services as their prices are no longer needlessly inflated by wasteful TV advertising anymore.
Get rid of ALL interrupt-driven TV ads and replace the lost time with program content and do one (or both) of the following:
2) Increase in-program product placement. This doesn't work on me as I notice it anyway. Right now it seems to be restricted to 1-2 placements per show that I watch that has it but that can increase.
3) Squash the 'content window' a bit and run text ads ticker tape style across the bottom of the screen. I'll ignore those as well as I have NO interest in what would be sold there.
The only real benefit I get out of TV ads nowadays is finding the catchy background music in them online in full length to listen to in WinAmp.
Slashdot CAPTCHA: epitaph How apt!
P.S. to Slashdot: Please turn off the proxy IP check to speed up the posting process. That's what the CAPTCHA is for to stop automated posting anyway.
Advertising agencies (which actually produce most of the ads you see) exist NOT to sell product to consumers, but rather, TO SELL ADVERTISING TO COMPANIES.
If companies don't buy advertising, *they* might not go out of business, but the *ad agencies* most certainly WILL.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Huh? Tv shows are around 23 minutes, with 7 minutes of commercials, or roughly 30% commercials. And you think 1 minute is too much for 5 minutes? (I personally think ANY is too much, but I wouldn't say it is for everyone)
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
What they really should have added was a way for the end users to resize ALL flash content - as it is the incompetent webdesigners (ie 99%) who use flash to make tiny unreadable flashsites always disable the zoom, so the rest of us can't read it.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
no no no, you loopy brothel inmate
'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) [...] This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."
I'm glad to see Adobe is doing their part to try to help Microsoft's new Silverlight succeed.
If this happens, I want it free legal internet TV! I already watch a lot of TV shows on the net thanks to sites like youtube and dailymotion (and the great sites that link to the content on them ;) ).
Unfortunately, those videos regularly get removed because of copyright issues.
Now, by enforcing ads, they could finally upload copyrighted content and even organize it on the site, so people don't have to search for it.
Of course, people can just do something else while the ad is playing, but it's the same for TV!
For people who don't have a TV, flash videos are great. That way, it sometimes becomes unnecessary to download movies and TV series over P2P, torrents,rapidshare&co.
This is especially true for TV shows, where I don't really mind having a "bad" quality.
I know there are already some legal free internet TVs, but their content is often not very interesting.
I want great movies and TV series!
If this happens, I want free legal internet TV! ;) ).
I already watch a lot of TV shows on the net thanks to sites like youtube and dailymotion (and the great sites that link to the content on them
Unfortunately, those videos regularly get removed because of copyright issues.
Now, by enforcing ads, they could finally upload copyrighted content and even organize it on the site, so people don't have to search for it.
Of course, people can just do something else while the ad is playing, but it's the same for TV!
For people who don't have a TV, flash videos are great. That way, it sometimes becomes unnecessary to download movies and TV series over P2P, torrents,rapidshare&co.
This is especially true for TV shows, where I don't really mind having a "bad" quality.
I know there are already some legal free internet TVs, but their content is often not very interesting.
I want great movies and TV series!
The next time you have a court case, a presentation or any other function any of the companies promoting this idiocy needs, I suggest you do the following:
(1) Make sure that everybody is in first.
(2) Using a megaphone, market something totally different to them (say, a charity), using heavily emotive language and imagery.
(3) Explain you're merely following their example
(4) Then proceed as normal
This is, after all, what they do to you.
Ditto for DVDs. If you have little children you know they don't yet understand the concept of patience - they would like to see their favourite movie NOW (and some people never grow out of that, but I digress). I would like to provide some insight to the bastard that came up with the idea of prefacing the main movie with 5 mins of unavoidable marketing material (no fast forward or skip) by means of rectal insertion of the DVD box with help of a heated sharp poker. It's one of the reasons I now use VLC and a computer for this crap.
Oh, and for UK people, if you're presenting to anyone working at companies like London Underground, make sure you take a guy along with a megaphone who will at complete random intervals shout "MIND THE GAP", "IT IS PROHIBITED TO SMOKE ON LONDON UNDERGROUND" (f*cking arrest a couple of those morons for a change and you'd never have to use that tape again), "AT PRESENT, WE HAVE A GOOD SERVICE ON ALL LINES" (yeah, I heard that when I'd been waiting for 20 minutes, go and fool someone else) and "USE THE OYSTER CARD TO SAVE MONEY" (yes, that same card that loses money everywhere without LU having an explanation for it). In general, the megaphone should be active enough not to leave a word of your original presentation left, more or less identical to not having a moment to THINK when you're in the system.
What the f*ck is wrong with these people?
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but seriously, I do not get what is with all the bitching and moaning about *GASP* having to watch ads before you view some video content.
You obviously do not hate ads as much as the next guy. If you did, you would be bitching about them just like the next guy. The fact that you spend the rest of your post defending forced viewing of ads proves that you do not find them nearly as offensive as many of us, making your first sentence flat out inaccurate (to put it kindly).
There are business models that do not rely on forced advertising. Google has been quite successful in making their ads inoccuous enough that few, if any, bother to filter them. Indeed, google has been intelligent enough to make their advertising useful at times--but they do so by making them text only, relevant to what the person is searching for, and keeping them out of the way of the main product. Forced ad viewing does the opposite of all of these things, and frankly, as far as I'm concerned, any "forced-ad viewing" site that goes out of business makes the world a better place.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Adult Swim Fix has been doing this with ads for months now. They space them out enough to not make it too annoying though. To their credit, the video quality on the shows is much better than most online players though.
Yes I do, and here's why. The Internet is not TV. The costs are much much lower, and you also have a highly targeted audience that you know a lot about.
Let's look at google / youtube / doubleclick (since they are all one, or soon to be.)
Google probably knows that you are a guy, your general age group, things that interest you, etc. They can "guess" about this from all the data collected from you, your gmail contents, and what you search for. Just your search history alone says volumes. This means that it's possible for gootube to deliver YOU a very specific ad that most likely will hit the advertiser's primary market. If you are a gamer, you may be more likely to get ads for new graphics cards, games, etc. than ads for tampons. The advertiser's dollars and ads are a LOT more effective this way and can be shorter.
TV on the other hand just blasts the same ads to everyone. For example, the "Food Network" primarily targets women even though guys who like to cook watch too. If I watch the news, less than 5% of the ads target me - half are for women, and most of the rest are for drugs, crappy American cars that I would never buy, TV dinners, medicare supplemental insurance, ambulance chasing lawyers, etc. Let's be VERY generous and say that 20% of the 30% target me. That's about 1.4 minutes for 23 minutes of content, or about 18 seconds for 5 minutes of content.
That help?
Obnoxious ad + other Firefox tabs + mute button + 30 seconds of reading something else = Problem solved
quia potentia mens mentis
GO DOWNLOAD ONE LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE DID
They've even got version 9 out. (finally)... so the only sites you won't be able to view flash video on are ones run by retarded web developers whose sites won't recognize flash player on a non-Windows host.
Tech Public Policy stuff