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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."
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.
Makes me want to hack and repurpose them.
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!
Your statement is a wonderfully concise explanation of the craziness of this story.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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!
Strikes me as extremely stupid, then. What stops them to buy an eReader and ask the magazine be delivered in electronic format, with all the multimedia ads they want?
Well, he was talking about farmers. The farmers are smart. Magazine publishers, on the other hand...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I was thinking the same thing - there's a big difference between something that looks like a sheet of paper, but with animation on it, and something that looks like a small TV screen stuck into a hole in the page.
Maybe it looks better in real life, but it looks quite some way from proper "sci fi" e-paper to me.