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IBM Files DVD Spam Patent Application
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Wilson of Gizmodo.com reports that IBM is applying for a patent for DVDs that contain or download 'on demand' commercials that cannot be skipped. Consumers would be able to purchase these DVDs at a lower price than regular DVDs and pay extra to enjoy their purchase ad-free without having to buy a second DVD. Perhaps this is part of the massive shift in advertising that IBM predicts."
Consumers would be able to purchase these DVDs at a lower price than regular DVDs and pay extra to enjoy their purchase ad-free without having to buy a second DVD.
The thing that distinguishes spam from commercial mail is that it's unsolicited. These discs sound like they suck, but they're not spam. (I note the linked article doesn't mention spam either)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Wow, I can't wait to get a defective-by-design DVD player that supports this.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
oh wow... this will surely be a hit. Where do I sign up? :s ...this just shows how greedy these media people are. So you still PAY... it's NOT FREE... PAY.. AND get to see ads?... wtf! Eventhough it has a lower price... no no no... no thank you no!
In game ads and now movie ads... this is getting ugly.
I'm sure DVD Shrink can fix this problem.
... is based on shoving it down the consumers throat will ultimately fail.
If I see an add which annoys me, I will try pretty hard to avoid that company in the future.
So companies should not try to figure out "How do we FORCE people to see our adds", but "What can we do that people WANT to see our adds".
THAT is the big shift in marketing that could save the advertising business.
Also, since this idea is based on the DVD player having an connection to the internet, it would be pretty simple to set up the local network in a way that redirects all download attempts to a local server which just gives out 0-second spots or something.
I agree.
Something like this falls well in that category of advertising, although there was really no need to mention fecal matter in the summary...
.
.
What F? Aaah... massive SHIFT... My bad.
Still... That would be a shitty deal.
Ah well... there is always pirated version with no adverts.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
1 - find out what address these ads are served from.
2 - set up a server of your own, serving 0.5 seconds of not-advertising insterad of all the crappy ads the manufacturer intended.
3 - Use hosts file or simlar cleverness to redirect DVDs to the fake server.
4 - ????
5 - PROFIT!!!
If they enforce the patent, there will likely be less DVD's that actually use this technology (assuming most content distributors won't want to pay for a license on the patented technology).
Then again, who cares anyway. TV is already dead, now if DVD's also get killed by gratuitous advertising left, right and center, it will only drive people towards other alternatives (such as iTunes or using bittorrent) even faster.
In fact, this has been happening for a while, what with many DVD-players forcing you to watch the MAFIAA warnings they put in front of each and every movie these days.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
I'm sure they feel if they can get people used to having ads then they can drop the lower price point then just make it standard on all DVDs. They'd probably phase it in but I have to believe that's the real intent is to make the technology available industry wide and slowly get rid of the option and simply make it another revenue stream. I won't watch FX Channel because of the in program ads on the screen. If they go this route with DVDs, force feeding commercials, I'll stop buying and renting, period. I barely rent as it is because there are so few films worth seeing. This is just another way to bleed a few extra cents out of each DVD. I just hope people aren't stupid enough to accept it but given the lack viewer reaction to the current onslaught of commercials I have to believe the future is even more pervasive commercials and me reading more books.
Setting aside the fact that what this will really wind up with is not a discounted ad-supported DVD, but a $30 ad-supported DVD and an *INCREASED* $35 or $40 commercial-free DVD -- why would I want to pay for something that has ANY ads?
If you're going to cram it full of advertising, why aren't you giving it to me for FREE? Making me PAY for it to come with advertising is a good way to convince me to go get it sans-advertising entirely free online.
Every time I read about DRM being dropped (ha!) I am hopeful that Big Media finally understands that you shouldn't go out of your way to piss of your customers.. Then we get more news blurbs like this.. /shakes head
I've heard they filed a patent for tattooing ads on the inside of peoples eyelids.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
I thought about this on the weekend. When you buy any Sunday paper, you get masses of leaflets and spam etc. I'd happily pay 10p more for the paper if it came without any ads or pamphlets.
The problem is, the ad people probably wouldn't be too happy about only advertising to people who are by definition parsimonious.
Current DVDs, at least those for popular new releases, tend to have 5+ uninterruptible previews/ads up front. I guess these new ones will be more intrusive, but cheaper. There are things to like about that, I guess. As long as they're starting down the road for tiered pricing, it would be nice if they could offer ad-free DVDs as well, a product that's not available for most titles now. For that matter, it would be nice if they offered extremely cheap DVDs with ads interrupting the movie every scene or so.
If I remember Patent 101 correctly, your patent is specifically limited to the claims you make.
So this one only covers Digital Versatile Discs. Not HD-DVD, not BluRay, not any theoretical third HD media format.
Hands up, everyone who wants to go out and buy a whole new DVD player, because you don't already have one in the house? Really?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Thanks IBM; this is just what I wanted for Christmas.
All I got you were these raspberries.
pppppppppppppppfffffbbbbbtttttt!
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Get the disc at a discount, run AnyDVD, sounds good to me!
I wonder how long it will be before home entertainment products come with weaponry to coerce you into viewing advertisements...
If someone can't afford to buy the full price DVD, are they going to be able to afford the things that the DVDs are advertising?
My bet's on credit card averts.
-1 not first post
talk about blatant efforts at mass hypenosys. we've seen plenty of desperation (out&out FraUD/deception) in our day, but these corepirate nazi FUDgepackers are taking pages from the story of the naykid furor, & the third reich (again, for a bit more mammon). the constant insidious marketeering has convinced us to do our 'shopping' using local crafters who do not advertise/paticipate in the continued execrabilious mindphuking of many of US. now big blue wants US to pay extra to avoid same? arrrgggh.
the lights are coming up all over now. see you there?
Well, if the ads are on the dvd put it in your dvd ripper and remove the ads and UOPs, not too difficult. ;-)
If they come over the internet, too bad I don't have a connection.
Think about it, little kid asks for something, parent says no. Kid logic kicks in and the kid starts whining about it, bad parenting responds and gives in, proving to the kid that whining works.
Advertisers ask us to buy X with ads, we say NO. Advertisiers logic kicks in and starts forcing us to watch the AD, do we give in? Doesn't really matter, if we don't, they just push harder and if we give in, then IT WORKS, so they push harder to sell even more!
F1 racing used to be broadcast by every country in europe, this was great because in olden days it meant you could choose your preffered commentator (if you live in holland you get English, Dutch, Belgian and German state TV on cable) ALL without commericial breaks. Then came some commercial channels that outbid the state tv offerings, so people stopped watching the feed from that country and just watched F1 in a foreign language. When the Dutch F1 broadcast went commericial I switch to the BBC and when that went commericial I switched to Belgian tv.
When that too went commerercial, I stopped watching F1. The commercial breaks were just too many to put up with.
So what has the F1 organisation achieved? They lost a viewer who at least saw all the regular ads on the racetrack because they wanted more money. So they wanted more and got nothing.
I may be alone, but viewing figures for F1 are down. They blaim it on the races themselves but might it just be that people are sick to death of the show being interrupted constantly for ads?
A similar story can be seen around Dutch soccer. That was broadcast by tradition by the NOS, the state part of state telivision. (I am not a soccer fan so excuse me if I get some details wrong) Years ago a commercial channel was launched (sport 7?) which would be pay-per-view like setup. People didn't subscribe. At all. It was a HUGE FLOP. They had totally miscalculated dutch willingness to pay for soccer matches. They thought they would be rich, they ended up bankrupt.
So the license went back the next year to the NOS. Recently another new station launched, this time "free" to watch, Talpa, and it too made a really big deal out of getting SOME of the rights to some of the soccer matches. Again they thought they would make it big, but people just didn't watch. The way the matches were broadcast was a constant source of irritation among soccer fans and the ads were way to heavy.
End result? Talpa went bust and soccer matches are now more or less back in the old format.
The odd thing? Holland is soccer nuts, so what could go wrong with pushing lots of ads around soccer matches? It works in the US right?
Well, in theory it might be simply a case of too much too soon, you have to remember that it is not that long ago that the only ads were BEFORE and AFTER a match NOT during NOT even during half-time. Even more shocking, on sunday there were NO ADS AT ALL.
This has changed but still, ads during the match itself may have been too much.
A clear case of being too demanding, kids KNOW this, they know when to push it and when they are about to be sent to their room. Advertisers just don't seem to be able to spot the warning signs. They keep pushing and pushing when we already kicked them out of the house to freeze to death.
The reason is offcourse simple, advertisers do NOT care about selling a product with their ads, they are selling ADS!
Every obnoxious ad campaign that drives you nuts HAS ALREADY BEEN A SUCCESS because the ad SOLD!
So us claiming that the ads for MS software on slashdot are a stupid idea are missing the real picture. The ad company that sold those ads, made a sale and that is all that matters. That is why you should never believe any research on ad effectiveness by an ad company unless you believe research on soap by soap companies.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I expect ad-infested DVDs will cost the same as now, and we will pay more than now for ad-free. That or I do not know anything about this world.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Before computers were networked we used to copy files onto floppy disks and walk them down the hall to the next office. As a form of content distribution, this is about where DVDs are at today.
From an engineering point of view, putting stuff on plastic disks and physically moving them to their destination is a pretty dumb way to distribute content in the face of an Internet.
In the absence of a successfully viable Internet distribution method that ensures some form of copy restriction, the likely reason for movies on DVD is to safeguard distribution rights. But things may change if the current method of funding Internet content through advertising is to expand to include television and movies, much like it does for broadcast TV and radio. So while IBM may hope to gain a market share in DVD advertising, the whole medium may be obsolete in a few years. Just a thought.
or is going to try and create the change?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If DVDs are shipped with must-see commercials, then more and more consumers will feel willing (and perhaps justified) to "illegally" extract the desired content from their **purchased** DVD and burn a new, content-only DVD. This is a stupid plan.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Disney disks have been doing this for years, sticking tonnes of unskippable commercials on the disk. Usually 10-15 minutes of them.
Only they charge you a premium for the disks when compared to other studios.
In all seriousness, if I'm getting physical media that I should be able to watch how I want at my leisure and I'm forced to watch ads, that shit better be free. And for that matter, so had the player that would support this. However cheap they make it, I am not under any circumstances paying to be forced to watch ads. I thought it was bad enough that it costs money to watch cable TV and you still get ads, but at least there I can change the channel while an ad's on, or make use of the PVR functionality of the cable box to time shift and commercial zap.
I bought a few DVD's that have the uninterruptible previews at the beginning. One of them was so bad, that even the stop button was locked out. I did the right thing, and after calling universal pictures up and bitching at one of their interns for a few minutes over the phone, I went online and ordered a cheapo slave labor dvd player from china. It ignores the flags that prevent me from skipping previews. I never entered into any agreement to watch the previews, so I shouldn't have to. Most new DVD's don't seem to lock you out of previews anymore. I guess too many angry calls and letters from people. Some DVD's now even allow you to press menu to get past the FBI warning.
Shortly after the system goes online, it will start downloading adverts for more advert-infested DVDs. Disks will start multiplying exponentially, the world will plunge behind an event horizon, and the universe will be sucked into a supermassive black-hole of infinite advertising.
Much the same kind of thing happened when they started printing adverts for breakfast cereal on packets of breakfast cereal.
The Disney movie Ratatouille is already sold with a commercial you can't skip, and the Mac movie player obeys that directive.
With this kind of crap, I'd rather steal the things I want to keep, and rent the things I'm too lazy to bother. What is the point of owning a disc when it is polluted with commercials?
The appeal to the lowest common denominator is destroying everything, because they're too stupid to know any better. That's where the money is. Being sophisticated and affluent counts for nothing these days.
Will the system also support viewing the latest Hollywood blockbusters without the usual abundance of product placements?
Well, as long as someone holds a patent to something we don't like, it should be sufficient to tell this single group of people that they shouldn't let it out.
... We had something called elections, whose outcome could really make a difference. As governments are more and more shifted away from people, we might need other people fulfulling our wishes ...
Previously that's what governments were for
There are some sayings that apply - "vote with your money" is the first that comes to my mind.
DVD? Is that something like a torrent file, only on a disc?
Seriously, this patent has both workable and novel parts. Unfortunately the novel parts aren't workable the workable parts aren't novel. Most DVDs already have unskippable commercials on them - usually selling the idea of DRM in the form of piracy warnings. As for downloadable commercials, will it be a requirement to have an internet connection to play a DVD? Throw away your DVD players now - especially the portables!
But, back to my title question - what's a DVD? With CDs, once you start chucking in crap that's not in the published specification, then the thing you're selling can no longer be described as a CD.
Do DVDs follow the same kind of regime? If so, I suggest these be marketed as Digitally Unplayable Discs.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
One of our DVD players is really cheap - it basically reboots every time you take it out of standby, so you have to watch all that copyright stuff yet again if you interrupt your viewing.
You do get the feeling that DVDs were invented just to irritate and control you - and going back to VHS is a good feeling after that. I can't see this new step forward to be very popular!
of the feature presentation.
In fact, they seem to make a big thing out of that "feature"....
Granted I only have about a dozen HD DVDs but I haven't found one to break that feature yet, but I bet some company will. I wonder if Blu-Ray has a similar requirement
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
- it doesn't matter if the kids scratch the disc, I can replace it easily
- I can go straight to the movie after putting the disc in the player
- I don't have to watch the FBI warning (I have one disc that has 3.5 minutes of warnings from various conutries that was unskippable! They really expect me to sit through that?)
With VHS, I could just fast forward through the ads. With DVD, if you are going to make the ads unskippable and thus make me take the effort to correct that, I'm going to just remove the ads altogether from my copy. You lose ground by being too greedy.Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Hang on, don't DVDs (at least ones in the UK) have unskippable bits already?
I know some of my DVDs (the CSI boxed sets for one) have some crap from the film copyright people about "you wouldn't steal an old lady's handbag and knock her to the floor, you wouldn't steal thousands of pounds worth of car before causing large amounts of terror and damage, you wouldn't kill a school full of children in a murderous rampage, so don't copy a load of bits from a disk valued at about £10-£20".
There's also some trailers and some intro sections (like the film producer/publisher titles) that can't be skipped on a lot of films.
Not quite sure where they get a patent without prior art for from that lot (unless it's specifically for 'product advertising' as opposed to 'information' or 'trailers', at which point it's a small logical step anyway).
I play the rips, which conveniently have the bullshit ads removed, and keep the originals in a closet.
Blar.
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
/Bill Hicks
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi... Whatever, you know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."
Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!
"Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing."
Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that."
God, I'm just caught in a fucking web.
"Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar..."
How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you?
"What didya do today honey?"
"Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight." [snores] "Yeah we just said you know is your baby really too loud? You know?" [snores] "Yeah, you know the mums will love it." [snores]
Sleep like fucking children, don't ya, this is your world isn't it?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Yes, because if there's anything I hear the typical consumer demanding, it's that we should have more mandatory advertising.
What's that, you say? It's the advertisers who are demanding it? It just proves, once again, who the actual customer is for any and all media produced: advertisers. Viewers are just the product being delivered to them.
I've seen this before...
There have been many times where I've rented a dvd, started watching it and found that I was unable to skip or go to a menu or fast forward or anything without watching the commercials.
I've long been annoyed with having to skip over commercials in what I "tape" on my (Pioneer) HD recorder. My next recorder is surely going to be a real computer rather than a traditional commercial product.
I wonder: do MythTV-based players also enforce the "do not skip" segments, or does it have a more consumer-friendly approach?
If it does, I wonder if it would be a legal risk zone to do this to "patent-encumbered ad blocks" (if it can be called that).
"Good news, everyone!"
All this talk about ripping to get around the annoying FBI, MPAA "Don't steal this", and ad segments has me thinking.. if I had a media center PC in my living room, is there a software DVD player that would enable me to play from the original DVD, but skip those bits? I mean, why go through the bother of ripping and wasting blanks? I've never had a reason to assemble a media center PC, but if it could do this.. it'd be worth it to me.
Funny thing is, in the US, ESPN doesn't cut to commerical during play. They advertise like hell in their little ticker at the bottom, but they don't interrupt play for commercil time.
I hate buying HBO TV boxsets because the first disc always has a group of HBO commercials and all the functionality to skip it is disabled. So every time I put that disc in I have to sit through 5 minutes of HBO commercials for their other boxsets. Are there DVD players out there that can override this?
Can I bum a sig?
I refuse to buy most DVDs these days becuase a vast majority prevent skipping the previews. Not sure if this is a factor of using software DVD player (Mac Mini on my home theater) or if the DVD publishers find it acceptable to prevent skipping straight to the main DVD menu? Either way, I'll continue to avoid purchase and return any DVD setup in this manner.
DVDs and movie tickets are already too expensive. Making them cheaper with subsidized adverts is NOT the answer.
I think they grossly misunderstand the reason people aren't buying DVDs. Target is selling some titles for $6.50. And there are still plenty of those titles left on the shelves. It's not because six and half bucks is too expensive for Snow Dogs, even though it is, it's that nobody wants to be seen actually having a copy of Snow Dogs on their shelves.
I'll refer you to this article from The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38626
bkd
The big problem with ads on dvds that you purchase, is that the ads themselves become completely out of date soon after your purchase. A person's dvd collection may have hours of trailers for movies that everyone has otherwise forgotten!
At least TV ads change.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
that ibm will demonstrate social responsibility again and make license fees so high for this that no one bothers to license it and we dont lose the ability to skip over a commercial in a dvd.
i dont buy dvds in general (save for absolute favorites office space, three amigos, band of brothers and the matrix 10 dvd set.. ) , but if i did and was forced to watch a commercial everytime i played the thing I'd be rather annoyed.
Next thing you know theyll start interjecting dvds with commercial interruptions that you cant skip..
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
DVDs that contain or download 'on demand' commercials that cannot be skipped
How is it "on-demand" if
1) I do NOT want them
2) I can NOT stop/skip them
3) I did NOT press my remote's "I demand to be shown a commercial right now!" button
(I'm assuming this particular term was only in the summary here, not in the article that I didn't actually read)
Oh, great! Now we can watch the annoying HeadOn commercials in HD!
"cannot be skipped"? Great, free software will never be "encumbered" by this patent :) The only thing left to do is to write a patch that makes the player automatically skip titles that "cannot be skipped".
Maybe IBM patenting this idea is a good thing...if they refuse to license it out to any studio at any price, and send the attorney drones after everyone who even comes close to infringing it.
I mean, I could actually get something cheaper than the $27 Durabrand that I bought at WalMart (regular price) that supports digital out, so I get Dolby Digital and DTS, progressive scan, is hackable and will output PAL on my discs that I bought in Europe instead of trying to convert to NTSC like most players do (surprisingly my TV supports both 576i and 576P at 50 Hertz on an American HDTV). We just all know that $27 for a DVD player is outragious, and we must have some type of commercial support to make them cheaper!
Oh, and surprisingly, as I do not have HDMI and therefore cannot upconvert, the $27 player actually seems to play nicer than my PS3 with my TV, for some odd reason with the PS3 the tv keeps trying to redetect the resolution at 480p every couple of minutes, which means you loose picture every few minutes. Quality wise, the $27 player looks and sounds just as good as the more expensive players.
Eventually, they might stop making commercials altogether, just the threat will be enough to make the viewer cough up the cash so they don't have to see them.
There will be a black market for products that skip or distort the advertisements. The advertising industry will send enforcers 'round your neighborhood with anti-advertising detectors to find those who are skipping the commercials without paying for the privilege. When they find them, they'll sue users of these hacks, for back-pay and damages, having taken lessons from the RIAA.
It's the DVD that's demanding it, not you.
I'll rip it, I'll strip it, and I'll be paying less for the DVD...
No sig today...
We buy DVDs to watch our favorite Movie, TV show, etc. at our leisure. To spend some time and relive the good times watching our favorite show. What good are ads "Coming soon to Disney DVD..." to me when I am watching the movie 4 years after it was released. What ever movie is "coming soon" is already back in the vault and I can't get it anymore.
Same with Major Motion Picture titles. I realize that they want to preserve the movie theater experience with showing me 20 minutes of previews before the main feature, but I am at home, and I don't want to waste those 20 minutes. Want to know why "ripping" a DVD is so popular? We want to watch the damn movie, not previews of "coming attractions" that came out last year. "Coming soon to DVD, Star Trek III" wtf?!!?
Yea, ads for DVDs work...they work to make me learn how to rip my library so I don't have to see the ads and I can get right to the feature.
Sig? What's a Sig?
I've brought this up before... but it bears repeating.
Purchasing the DVD itself, offsets the cost of advertising.
This means, if I put down money in exchange for the product, I expect that I won't be forced to sit through the ads. We have pay-cable that is supposed to be ad-free. Is it? Not anymore. Paying the additional fee for Showtime, HBO, Cinemax and so on was supposed to be an enhanced, ad-free experience. Now all of those channels are full of garbage advertisements, cutting into the show's playing time.
In fact, I have a DVD of cartoons and such for my daughter, which doesn't even let me PAUSE or STOP the previews once they start playing. I can't fast-forward through them, I can't pause or stop them, and so my 3-year old daughter is forced to watch distracting, ADD-inducing advertisements for movies well outside her age range.
That particular DVD went right back to the store for a full refund (NOT a store credit).
What was my other option? Rip the DVD and take out the advertisements, and burn it back to another disc. I already paid for it. It belonged to me. I can do with it, what I wish. I don't need my daughter developing any sort of "brand loyalty" or ADHD at her age, just so she can watch her favorite cartoon while we travel.
We're all getting used to seeing these annoying ads in the lower-right corner of our favorite television shows now. First they were static images showing what was coming next. Then they were animated. Then they got LARGER. Now they have sound, bleeding right over the top of the show you're watching. Now they ads stay in the corner throughout the ENTIRE SHOW.
What am I paying a cable bill for, if I'm still forced to watch the advertisements DURING my show? We're not talking about commercial breaks here. At least projects like MythTV are smart enough to programmatically remove the advertisements and commercials, leaving just the intended watching experience left on the drive.
The point is, if you can't price your product accordingly to remove ads entirely for the customer, then your business model is wrong, or your pricing is wrong. Fix those, don't force more advertising down our throats. It's getting out of hand now.
If the force-feeding of advertisements continues, I know I'll be joined by a few million of my friends who will simply stop supporting those products and terminate our cable television services, as well as return any and all products that force ads on us without the choice to skip or remove them.
If it was, yanking the ethernet plug while starting up the player would seem to defeat the download.
Have gnu, will travel.
You make some very good points but most people here won't know the details about European programming (I can verify your claims as far as my knowledge goes on these subjects).
However I'm afraid you misunderstand what the general publics opinion of ads is: a necessary evil. A minority, if not small minority of people, are not (or almost not) influenced by ads and are able to close themselves from ads (consciously, because subconsciously its much harder). Those people tend to prefer not to watch ads, and some of those people hate ads. However most people do not mind ads. They like targetted advertising, and are susceptible/suggestable. Another option is to do something inbetween ads, like a toilet visit, make coffee, doing laundry, taking a shower, going back to kitchen for dinner, and so on. The same is true for advertising on WWW: a small minority blocks ads. Most people do not block ads.
As for F1: on Dutch TV they now make you able to watch F1 in a smaller part of the TV. My father, a huge F1 fan, is almost blind. He is unable to follow the race during commercials. Heck, he can barely see what is happening if its full screen. He really needs the commentary.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
Televised soccer just doesn't happen in the US, unless you're talking about niche channels that cater to immigrant/expatriot populations within the US, or the World Cup, which has lately actually been getting some play here. The closest major league soccer team to me went to the finals and not a person that wasn't a soccer obsessive even knew about it, except for a brief mention on local news that they were going, and a mention that they lost.
The sports that do get broadcast widely are far more commercial-friendly. Basketball, American football, and baseball (not really counting hockey anymore) all have frequent breaks where commercials can be inserted easily.
This is silly
No, I will not work for your startup
Yes, the Imax
Y'know the one with the big screen and really good sound? and no commercials...
I guess it must be because it's Canadian and and pirates don't believe in commercials.