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Disney Says, You WILL Watch the Ads
smooth wombat writes "ABC and ESPN, both owned by Disney, have struck a deal with cable operator Cox Communications to offer hit shows and football games on demand, but with the condition that Cox disable the fast-forward feature that allows viewers to skip ads. This is the first agreement of its kind. It only applies to Cox's video-on-demand service and will not affect viewers using DVRs to fast-forward through ads. The companies will also test technology that will place ads in shows based on ZIP Codes and geographic area, and 'freshen' the ads with new ones every few days."
Even more reason to build a MythTV box..
At least i stil have my mute button and a laptop with wirless to distract me
I will not watch a Disney owned channel. Easy as that.
Content is neither bread nor air. I don't need it to survive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only reason they haven't put these restrictions on the DVRs yet is that they have to compete with TiVo. Once the competition is gone and they've gotten the market sealed up again you can expect these sort of restrictions to start appearing on their own DVRs. MythTV boxes don't count either. It seems to me that the cable companies only embraced DVRs in an attempt to kill them off, I imagine if they manage to drive TiVo out of business then they'll go back to their old tricks.
I read the internet for the articles.
Utterly stupid. You pay for cable. You pay for DVR service. You pay for in-demand. Then you get penalized for being a consumer and you can't use your DVR on paid-for content. Kinda pisses me off, even though I never order any ala carte content.
u-bend
So I'm paying for a TV show using on-demand and then am forced to watch ads also? Or is the on-demand service otherwise free. It sounds like a scam to me.
--- Bah, who needs a sig?
Stuff like this makes me not feel so bad that China has a government owned Disneylan.. err Shijingshan Amusement Park. http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1678
As a commercial producer, your goal is to get the attention of people and get them to remember your product. Because, well, that's what your customers pay for.
So far, commercials aren't even seen as a nuisance by many. They are an often welcome interruption for various personal needs, from bathroom to fridge. When you overdo it, people get annoyed.
And don't underestimate the negative effect of force. If you outright force people to watch an ad, they will connect no good feelings with it. So far, what makes people accept ads is that they enjoy the program around them and that they're in a generally good mood when they watch an ad. When they now pick up the remote and can't FF, they're pissed. And if this isn't carefully watched, the general mood when it comes to ads will be a very negative one. Not only on the "conscious" level, where people complain about ads, but also on the subconscious level.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Content" is a metaphor intended to make people think of creative works as products to be wrapped up and shipped around like any other commodity, when in fact creative works are natural expressions of our humanity and civilization.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"The agreement could also provide broadcast networks a way to give viewers an alternative to the convenience offered by digital video recorders , without allowing them to avoid the ads, according to the report"
Sorry what is being "given" to viewers here?
-An alternative to convenience (i.e. annoyance)
-"without allowing them to avoid" (i.e. "while forcing them...")
Maybe I'm old-school, but usually giving things to one's customers is, um, phrased positively like e.g.
"giving viewers quality programming *without wresting control of their devices from them
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The harder they try to control viewing habits, the harder people will work to thwart whatever system is put in place.
Sometimes when I'm watching something on TIVO I'll forget I can zip through the commercials. I'm more prone to forget and watch the commercials if there are fewer of them and they're interesting. The really obnoxious ones will spur me to either mute the TV if it's live, FF on TIVO and go to great lengths to find an alternative if some company like Disney tries to make me watch. Not happening.
I love the way advertisers treat viewing like a one-way street. You watch what we give you. Well, screw you, Disney. The local ads are the worst. There are several that get me diving for the mute button. Where if they were more informative and less obnoxious, it might make reaching for the remote more of an effort and I might not bother.
But broadcasters thinking they can squeeze 20 minutes of commercials into 60 minutes of broadcast and advertisers thinking we'll calmly sit through whatever annoying crap they throw up there...yes, I'm looking at you, Oxyclean guy...they can kiss my butt.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Huh?
Let me be more clear...
TV (over the airwaves) is financed through ads and sponsors. What about Cable TV, which I pay for? Why do I have to watch ads on those channels? And moreover, this article is about on-demand pay-per-view... why have ads in that? It isn't about financing it, it is about making more money. Unless they are going to lower the price because now the ads will assist in financing it. I think not.
If magazines are financed through ads (which is clear from their HUGE percentage of the magazine content) then why do I have to buy them?
Newspapers - same as magazines.
Radio - OK, here is the one area where you don't pay for it, so you endure the advertisements (or just change the station).
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What I don't understand is, time after time, people think they HAVE to consume media.
Just go outside! Enjoy the fresh air once in a while. I watch no TV (though there's one downstairs). Disney is probably doing people a favour.
-1 not first post
8+ months for me. When I moved, I deliberately did not have cable TV hooked up. Broadcast TV is pretty much pointless where I am. No TV? it's wonderful. There's too many other things to do than stare at the tube, and if I _am_ going to watch something it's deliberate, worthwhile, and ad-free: DVDs.
When I _do_ happen to watch TV (somewhere else), all I can think is how lame it is.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The former head of TBS is willing to put up with bathroom breaks, but thinks part of your contract is that you have to watch the commercials:
(Did you sign a contract where one of the terms is that you have to watch the ads? I rather suspect not, Mr. Kellner's belief to the contrary nonwithstanding....)
There is the main problem of open-source. Marketing and the public perception. If we cant get past that, then OSS will never get out of the geek world.
"if its free, that means they can get into your computer, you know all those hackers are bad" "if its free, it cant be any good" "why do they give it away then"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And you're getting one more advantage - since your kids watch a continuous 22 or 45 minute show, instead of seeing it broken up into blocks possibly as small as 8 minutes long by commercials, they cultivate a longer attention span. Quite possibly, they will do better in school and even adult life because of their home environment. Sadly, proving any of this is unlikely, as any realistic, controlled experiment would involve something like a test group watching 3 minutes of programming followed by twenty 15 second long commercials, for lots of hours on end. Any parent that would let their kid be in this test group would be unfit enough to serve as an alternate explanation for all the kid's problems.
Who is John Cabal?
Yeah, this is a bit off-topic, but I just had to chime in and say that I've run across this attitude towards open source software, too.
A coworker of mine bought a cheap computer a couple of years ago. He commented on how he didn't want to spend a lot of money of Microsoft Office for it, and was thinking about getting one of the second-tier office suites. I told him, "Just download OpenOffice."
He had no idea what I was talking about, and thought I was referring him to some seedy warez site. I explained what FOSS was and told him about some of the more popular FOSS applications out there, but he just couldn't bring himself to believe me. He was absolutely, positively convinced that you end up "paying" for free software in one way or another; that even if OpenOffice didn't charge you to download and install their software, that there was some kind of hidden catch where it had to be adware or spyware or something. I even showed him the copy of OpenOffice I have installed alongside Microsoft Office on my work machine. He seemed really impressed, but I think he still ended up buying a copy of StarOffice or Corel WordPerfect Office because he just couldn't believe that it was free.
Needless to say, I don't think he's going to be a Linux convert anytime soon.
It almost made me wish that OpenOffice.org would set up a web site, something like OpenOffice.com, that has the exact same software, but charges you a $50 or so fee to download. Unfortunately, regardless of the best of intentions, some people just don't get it. At least then, I could point these people to the site where you can get the "real" copy.
I know how I'll work around it - I won't watch cable. Seriously. Fuck that shit. There's nothing so compelling on cable that I feel any need to keep it. I've posted before about how I have a MythTV project in the works and when it's done I'm going to drop my DirecTV service and just stick to over-the-air HDTV. And I haven't done it yet, since real life keeps getting in the way, and right now there's just no pressing need. But as more and more things like this keep happening, I have more and more reason to escape from the deadly clutches of pay TV. For now I can make do with getting the few shows on cable I care about via Bittorrent, but if they somehow close all those holes and goes away, I'll either get a Netflix subscription and get entire seasons of shows at once, or I'll just watch less TV! I've been without a TV before and, really, it's not nearly as traumatic as people make it out to be.