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."

Comments

Oh, come on!

[jawtheshark]

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.

Re:Oh, come on!

[garcia]

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.

You don't necessarily have to be mandated to watch the commercials, there is just an option to force it now. Copyright holders who are releasing self-made videos won't have to opt-in (depending on how any of the video sharing sites' (GooTube's) management decides to handle this I suppose) to allow the ads.

I think that this is a pointless move. Flash video exploded because it was fast and there weren't forcible ads and DRM.

Re:Oh, come on!

[L4m3rthanyou]

That will kill self-made videos in no time.

Woohoo! Thanks Adobe!

Re:Oh, come on!

[Seumas]

Personally, I don't even care. Unless it is really great content, I'm not going to waste my time watching any sort of ad before it. I'm tired of them trying to commoditize every god damn thing on the fucking internet.

One thing I hate is that on sites like gamespot, you have to watch an advertisement before you can watch a videogame trailer... which in itself is also an advertisement.

Hopefully this will start to kill internet video. There is nothing more I would enjoy more than seeing all these idiots who think the world wants to watch a 14 year old girl talk about how tough life is for two hours a day from her bedroom or some 70 year old moron singing and dancing suddenly go away.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Fozzyuw]

That will kill self-made videos in no time.

I respectfully disagree, It's an optional feature. Nothing is being stated that it will be used by masses of people. However, I can see that you're trying to go for the 'obtrusive' part as being a big downside, which is true.

Who really wants to wait through a 3 minute ad for tampons...

First, even TV commercials only last 15-30 seconds. They just play 5-6 different commercials in a row. The online advertisers are often doing something different. Checkout ABC's website. You can watch Lost, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate House Wives, and other shows, which include 2-3 30's commercials. I've watched these from time to time, and to tell you the truth, they're anything but bothering. The commercial MUST play through the full 30 seconds to access the next segment of the show. But the commercial stops and you must click a button to continue. So, like TV commercials, you can getup and take a break (of course, you can pause the video and do it anyways). From what I've already seen, these commercials are not that bad.

Of course, that doesn't mean there won't be bad commercials out there. The internet is a different media that attracts people differently and advertisement agencies will have to make sure they design their ads to be attractive and programmers will have to make sure they don't slam the user with too many.

...to watch a 2 minute rambing of a camwhore?

Good point, which is why they probably won't have ads on things that are not worth it. Also, it could probably also be designed like some popular sites that give you a full page 'ad' and make you click a link to go to the content, but do not show you another full page ad until 'x' minutes or you enter a different popular microsite. I would doubt video ads are going to be placed on most of YouTube videos. They'll probably stick to the unobtrusive text ads.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Enforcing advertisements could be good

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:Enforcing advertisements could be good

[gaspar ilom]

More like you watch a music video, you see a 30 second ad beforehand. Hate to break it to you:
Music videos *are* ads.

One more reason to shun Adobe

[drdanny_orig]

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?

Forced Ads...Forced Consumers?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

48 hours

[rossz]

I give it 48 hours after initial release before a patch to bypass the ads is released online.

Re:clever workaround

[jcgf]

I bet in 15 years there will be mpaa goons in your living room and you're tied up with your eyelids propped open ala Clockwork Orange. This will be considered normal by everyone and the mpaa will be trying to make even more draconian laws.

and Americans will still be telling me about how the terrorists "hate their freedom" ;)

Damned Flash

[Deagol]

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.

Re:Damned Flash

[Deagol]

gxine opens a new window (which is the worst solution possible),

Why is that? I much prefer segregating most media types to their own program and window. I bloody hate it when I'm using a Windows machine and I click on a Word or PDF file, and the entire app is embedded *into* the web browser. What dumbass thought *that* was a clever idea?!?

Enforced not watching

[Maxo-Texas]

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?

Re:I'm all for this

[vertinox]

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.

Flash video players are a horrible user interface

[kherr]

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's Not How I Remember It

[Greyfox]

I remember it as me graciously allowing them to use *MY* public airwaves to make a profit. And they ARE making a profit. I don't recall signing any other contract with them. I don't recall one ever even being implied. Not before this quote and not afterwards.

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.

Non-crap ads?

[phorm]

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"

This will never take off...

[SoVeryTired]

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.