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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."
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.
...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.
"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
No but the TOU of sites like youtube may mandate that you accept an ad to be put in-line with your video.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The Internet is cyclical: 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.
Alternatively, sites like Youtube could amend their terms and conditions to allow themselves to automatically add adverts to all videos as they were being downloaded.
If they did this to every video they would quickly alienate their users. But if (say) 1 video in 100 had an advert added as you downloaded it, they could make a lot of money without losing too many users.
Hopefully by the time this starts happening Gnash will be at a usable point.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
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.
Well this is really a problem for advertising. Am I more likely to buy products if you harass me with annoying ads? No. Yeah, yeah, talk about psychology and how people get conditioned, but I've worked in ad agencies and even the experts acknowledge it: ads have become so annoying that people are building up an immunity to them.
That why ads keep getting more and more outlandish-- ad agencies know that they have to get your attention somehow. Unfortunately, even e-mail campaigns that people have opted in to fail because people don't want to invest the time sorting that stuff from general spam. People are using modified host files and ad blockers to block even targetted advertisements because there are too many intolerable ads on the web. It isn't clear that people would bother developing such strict ad blocking if they were only receiving ads that they might be interested in. Even where there are no technical methods in place blocking ads, people have simply gotten better at ignoring them.
And so many advertisers have sought ways to deliver targetted advertisements, but unfortunately any method for targetting is usually seen as an invasion of privacy. No one really wants their personal preferences made public so that advertisers can profile them better.
And I know that very often people come back and say, "well they wouldn't use [spam|flash bannars|whatever] if it weren't effective!" There's some truth to that, but not as much as you might think. Often, people in advertising (at various levels) have trouble gauging the real success of a given campaign, but they sell their services on the basis of the number of views they've acheived. They tell their customers (the people who want their product advertised) that X number of people will view this ad. Y number of people will receive the e-mail. In fact, the advertisers who actually place the ad often have little interest in the success of the product itself or in the satisfaction of consumers. It's enough to convince their customer that the ad is being seen.
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
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!
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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.