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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."
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)
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/
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
...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.
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.
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 [...]."
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. -
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.
As a web developer all i can say is this.
Read radical news here
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?
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"
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.
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.
His point is that Gnash has no restrictions on its features, and could theoretically support features like enabling copying of Flash movies or permitting advertisements to be skipped. The official player will never support that since Adobe is introducing these features specifically in order to prevent bypasses.
~ C.
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...
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.