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)
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
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
and Americans will still be telling me about how the terrorists "hate their freedom" ;)
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
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.
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.
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 [...]."
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.
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?
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"
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.
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...
if everyone would, it might work, but there are idiots and apathetics everywhere or people that need that product
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.
If a company refuses to fix something for you that you need, you stop buying from that company. If you want support, buy something that guarantees support - it's not a difficult proposition, and there's plenty of companies who provide it. FOSS has no guarantee of support from anywhere, not even if I pay. There's the difference right there.
Oh, and here's a newsflash, Skippy:- Just because someone doesn't like Linux, it doesn't mean they haven't tried it or they use Windows. Sometimes, things don't work the way people want it to. Sorry to bust your bubble. I used Ubuntu for all of an hour, most of which was getting my USB keyboard to work. No dice.
I suspect you use Kubuntu as your primary OS, don't you? Try going out in the fresh air for a couple of hours, and see if your perspective doesn't change a bit. Trust me, it's got to be the least difficult thing you'd ever do without your computer, and there's no little to no risk of permanent trauma. Just open your front door, and that's it.
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.