Slashdot Mirror
Video Adverts On the Printed Page
An anonymous reader writes "Prepare yourself. A staple of near-future sci-fi—magazine video ads—are now a thing of the present. And which high-tech magazine is leading the charge? Wired? Popular Mechanics? Nope. Successful Farming. The advertisement itself is for a pesticide that protects crops against nematodes. You can see a video of the video here."
Did anyone catch whether or not there was a mute button? I could see an ad with audio like that being incredibly annoying when reading in a public place.
Overall though, I think this is an interesting trend. I definitely wonder whether or not the benefit of such an ad outweighs the cost of all the extra hardware...
Aren't there a lot of "bad things* in computers and monitors? Isn't it bad enough the ones on our desktops turn over every few years? Can you imagine if hundreds of thousands of these ended up in the landfill every month? Forgive me if I sound like a kneejerk hippy, but this just doesn't seem at all green.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I kinda want a copy of that mag...although I wonder if that screen can be used for anything else?
Yo dawg! I heard you like overkill, so we put up a video of a video of an advertisement in an advertisement so you can watch while you read about watching while you read!
Is it just me, or isn't that horrendously fucking ridiculously wasteful? Environmentally, that is.
.: Max Romantschuk
some more links with additional information.
this post includes info on pricing, the cost is $50/insert for a volume of 1,000
http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks/2009/08/welcome-entertainment-weekly-r.html
about halfway through there is footage of the raw board. looks like a standard small LCD, Li-Ion pack and logic board. and surprisingly a mini-usb for recharging
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3pI8F7ShSQ
One of the first things that come to mind is cost. How much does it cost to run these types of adds. Is it really cost effective to manufacture batteries, displays, speakers and memory for video to be viewed maybe once if at all just to be tossed out? Now if displays are really that cheap, we should also be seeing an effect of lower costs on all displays. Also where can I get a few dozen copies as I'd love to start hacking those displays and putting together some sort of awesome free display.
I used to dream about newspapers that had video where the pictures would normally go, but otherwise the pages with video didn't look any different from the pages you see in real newspapers. It's not as impressive when the video screen is small and the page is as thick as cardboard.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Yes. Yes I did.
Nobody noticed the abbreviation for Successful Farming is SF?
What happens when people can hack the magazine, and make it show rickroll clips?
...you can hardly call Wired a 'magazine'
I've been saying it for some time now, but farmers have pretty much always been on the cutting edge of technology. The common view of farmers as slack-jawed yokels couldn't be any further from the truth. For thousands of years, most technology advances were the domain of farming. How do you think we can continue to feed the world's growing population and still have food surpluses that can be used for stuff like ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, plastics, etc.?
Growing up as the son of a farmer, we were always playing around with new technology long before anyone else. Think your GPS is pretty sweet? Yeah, we had that in the early 90s for charting harvest yields (X bushels harvested at Y location with a relatively fine scale on the location == pretty yield maps). Wireless real-time stock quotes? We had that in the 80s for the futures markets. Self-driving vehicles? You've been able to buy tractors that would drive themselves in the fields for the past 15+ years, including collision avoidance (fields are not empty -- there are creeks, rocks, power lines, hills, etc that all need to be avoided or otherwise handled). The only thing surprising about this story is that this didn't happen 5 years ago.
1 year ago we had almost the same article on slashdot, without calling it "near-future sci-fi". http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/20/202243/A-Video-Ad-In-a-Paper-Magazine
Looking at this I was just thinking on how fast our technology moves.
15 years ago CRT screens were still the norm, 10 years ago they were still going strong against the flat screen competition. Now we have screens that are so flat and cheap that they can be added to a magazine page.
15 years ago playing video on your PC started to work, mostly. Not too high resolution and you're fine. Now we play video smoothly on our mobile phones. Video processors are now small enough to fit in a magazine page. The same for storage, even low res video requires a relatively large amount of memory.
15 years ago my simple mobile phone needed recharging of its bulky battery at least every two days, when not using it much. Now batteries have the capacity to run a video player, a small screen, for a significant period of time, all while being small enough to fit in a magazine page.
15 years ago I had a 120 MB hard disk in my computer, a quite reasonable size at the time. It served me well. Software came typically on small stacks of 1.44 MB floppy disks. Nowadays a magazine page can fit larger amounts of storage, at a mere fraction of the price.
It is simply absurd how fast this tech is moving these days. A video in a magazine page was pure science fiction at the time. The idea that you would go to a web page (that did exist already) and click on a link to watch a video without the need for a lengthy download.
We definitely live in exciting times for techies!
Sounds to me like a good source of cheap screens to hack and use with your favourite microcontroller.
Tch tch
This may well be another nail in the coffin of print media. At the moment at least, by and large, any magazines you subscribe to can be chucked in a paper bin for later recycling. What is one meant to do with these monstrosities?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Yes, this isn't interesting at all. It sure must be good at catching the attention of the reader which is one of the primary goals of advertising. But shouldn't this kind of technology be relegated to digital magazines? Why put expensive and environment damaging technology in such a thing as (most of the time) disposable media?
Thank Mohammad/Jesus for High Fructose Corn Syrup. Our kids would be so damn skinny and frail without that fricken gem.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
I wanted to watch the video on the magazine, for the geekiness of it, and was bored, watching the fancy graphics, while I was waiting for the name of the advertised product (which I have already forgotten, as the tech was more impressive than the name of an unknown product) to appear.
Now that I've seen what it's all about, and the novelty is lost, there is no way I am going to wait 45 seconds per page, to watch a <censored> video, while leafing through a magazine. In fact, I won't even notice there is a video, as it took a couple of seconds for the video to switch on, by which time I will have turned the page. If they cannot attract my attention with what's printed on the page, I am not going to see their ad!
This new technology does offer some interesting possibilities, though. Imagine, e.g., that I somehow get hold of my competitor's video, before it is published. I then create a video for my competing product, whose audio track is (inverse of competitor's audio track) + "competitor's products are useless" + (pitch for my product), then pay the magazine handsomely to publish my ad next to the competitor's, so that they are both activated when readers open the magazine at that page. Loads of fun!
I wonder which video codec they decided upon. I would imagine they'd pick OGM or VP8 to (considerably) reduce overhead by avoiding shelling out to MPEG.
Interestingly, the very first commercial in Polish TV after beginning of transformation towards capitalism was for Prusakolep, a bug bait with pesticide against the German cockroach, (Croton bug, Steam fly, Blattella germanica).
It wasn't all that much of a problem really and it being the first and only commercial on tv for quite a while (and run pretty frequently) it was pretty much leaving many people stumped, wtf is this about...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Just a thought.
I suspect a fake, though I would have a hard time trying to demonstrate it. Just one thought : who would be willing to pay the huge costs this ad represents?...
Reading TA it is revealed that only a small specially selected group of farmers got it, like farmers with over 1000 acres. At a price of $8000 an acre in Iowa, that means only operations with capitalization in excess of $8 million received the ad (which cost $50). So the answer is - a company running a targeted campaign to customers who might buy tens of thousands of dollars of their product annually. Some years ago a single click on an Overture search engine ad for the key word "data recovery" was worth $25 due to hefty sum a convertible lead would bring.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I don't think this is the first instance of this technology. I remember hearing about it last year. It was CBS and Pepsi.
It was discussed last August.
This is now a year after the first people did this. I suspect Slashdot covered it then too.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ads for content shown on the iPad will now arrive in your physical mailbox, in post-it form. Digital newspapers will have empty dotted rectangles where you can apply the ads of your choice.
Hackers all over the world will attempt to re-use the post-its for other purposes, with limited success.
would be fun to plop some different video into the mag of the guy across from you on the bus...
I'll have to ask around. While we don't have 1000's of acres (more like 70) but our annual revenue is probably 40-50x / acre of that an average produce grower. I'm pretty sure I can get my hands on one if make a few calls.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
We've seen this before: CBS Embeds a Video Playing Ad in a Print Magazine
--
Media Player Codec Pack
What makes you think they wont make me stop reading your magazine or newspaper as well?
The muggles have discovered magic. Cower in fear!
When they have the video technology of the Minority Report and can dynamically update a news paper, then I will be impressed and maybe just a bit nervous.