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."

Comments

Mute button

[thomasinx]

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...

Re:Mute button

[camperdave]

Did anyone catch whether or not there was a mute button?

I would imagine that it is like those musical greeting cards: close the page, and it shuts off.

Re:Mute button

[246o1]

This is the kind of thing that will make me want to carry around a hammer or an EMP device. Ads already pollute enough of my life.

Re:Mute button

[meerling]

Makes me want to hack and repurpose them.

Re:Mute button

[Z00L00K]

Then they just have to make it proofed against everything up to and including a sledgehammer.

But if you want to make sure that you aren't annoyed a few seconds in the microwave would take care of the problem.

The next thought is - can this be hacked? Probably, and now we will wait for those items to appear in pr0n magazines too. Just imagine what people will look like if the magazine stand starts to moan.

Re:Mute button

[somersault]

finally playboy can add video's to their magazine!

www.playboy.com + Mobile Internet Device

Adding videos to their magazine is like adding apostrophes to words that don't need them.

Re:Mute button

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The technology in use is Americhip's "Video in print". They are a touch light on technical detail; but it appears to be a full color LCD screen, most likely made possible by the economies of scale of the cellphone world, along with a driver board of some kind(unlike say, the fixed-segment, e-ink display that Esquire ran 100,000 of, which was pretty easy to control; but nearly worthless because it was fixed-segment and not even usefully so like the old LCD/LED alphanumeric displays).

I'd assume that, for the relatively short runs they are doing, the included videos aren't stored in mask ROMS or PROMs, and that the driver is some comparatively sane fixed-function-video-decoder-plus-LCD-driver-and-enough-GPIO-for-a-few-buttons thing. Whether the whole thing kindly has labeled holes for the insertion of a JTAG header, or even a logic-level "rs-232" interface easily available, or whether it is some cryptographic lockdown horror is another question, though...

Re:Mute button

[Anonymous Coward]

Preposterou's!

Re:Mute button

[Pezbian]

I remember Esquire.
Suit: "We encourage hacking of the displays!"
Hacker: "Well... I made a clock out of it... but that's all and it takes a training seminar to learn to read it."

This isn't going to be useless at all... until the suits realize they can save half a penny by shrinking the circuit board to get rid of all those trivial externally-accessible contacts, sealing the ASIC into an epoxy blob to save the expense of IC packaging and switching to PROM to spare the expense of Flash memory.

With the savings, they can afford louder speakers and larger batteries!

Sure, the whole things can no longer be recycled and Mother Nature showed up in person to slash her wrists, but it means another round of gold-plated Bentleysfor the Board of Directors so who gives a shit, right?

Re:Mute button

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be less concerned about strict cost cutting measures(the board is already height constraints, so I'm sure that headers and DIPs are out; but test lands never killed anybody with steady hands and I'm not at all sure that PROMs are much ahead of NAND Flash for bulk storage/$, also, particularly for short runs, being able to stock one driver board, programmable on demand, albeit quite possibly through a ghastly little custom connector/bed of nails arrangement is very handy).

My concern would more be that, recognizing the fact that sponsors will be Less Than Happy if their messages are being cut out and sold on ebay for reflashing, rather than viewed, the company would take some fairly simple; but quite difficult to break without die-level hacking, cryptographic measures.

For instance, if I were their engineer, I'd probably design the driver board as follows: Custom(or customized) ASIC with LCD driver, USB, hardware video decoder, flash interface, and something to support a few buttons. Package or blob, depending on bulk. Flash would be your basic NAND, as seen in USB drives everywhere, from whoever is cheapest. 4 flat test points, breaking out the USB interface, would allow the device to be programmed and charged.

However, to program the device, you would connect it to a computer, where it would present as a simple USB MSC device. You would load the videos you want, and a simple text file defining button functions and playlist order. Each video, and the definitions file, would be cryptographically signed. The ASIC would simply ignore any unsigned files.

Unless I fucked it up, you'd have to decap the ASIC and modify the silicon, which would be wildly uneconomic, to get it to play your own stuff, yet it would all be totally standard, off-the-shelf, type hardware. Boom.

Landfill...

[bennomatic]

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.

Re:Landfill...

[vidnet]

Well, considering that it's an advert for poison...

Re:Landfill...

[camperdave]

Forgive me if I sound like a kneejerk hippy, but this just doesn't seem at all green.

Just turn off all the red and blue pixels, and it'll be green.

Re:Landfill...

[Spacezilla]

Doesn't matter, that post will surely get modded up to the maximum as Insightful in no time.

Re:Landfill...

[gringer]

Well, actually, the way you are meant to be moderating (according to the /. underlords) can be found here. It's almost the reverse of what you suggest. Quote unrelated:

• Insightful -- An Insightful statement makes you think, puts a new spin on a given story (or aspect of a story). An analogy you hadn't thought of, or a telling counterexample, are examples of Insightful comments.
• Interesting -- If you believe a comment to be Interesting (and it's not mostly Redundant, Offtopic, or otherwise lame), it is.

Pimp my mag

[XiaoMing]

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!

Re:Pimp my mag

[gringer]

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.

Looks cool, but

[Max Romantschuk]

Is it just me, or isn't that horrendously fucking ridiculously wasteful? Environmentally, that is.

Re:Looks cool, but

[plumby]

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.

further details

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Interesting

[Xeno man]

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.

Not quite the future I imagined

[Adrian Lopez]

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.

Re:Not quite the future I imagined

[Pezbian]

Reminds me of video in Windows 3.1. If it didn't crash every half-second, you were treated to 96x72px moving postage stamps of the moon landing and other stuff that actually made a VHS tape look great in comparison.

Didn't I see this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Yes I did.

What's in a name?

[tgv]

Nobody noticed the abbreviation for Successful Farming is SF?

Another misleading summary...

[dmitriy88]

...you can hardly call Wired a 'magazine'

Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[Osty]

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.

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[osu-neko]

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...

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[0WaitState]

There's no technology helping with ethanol production, unless you consider technology oriented towards lobbying congresscritters. There's only a tiny, tiny band of US farmland where one can grow corn efficiently enough to achieve a small (1.01 coefficient) energy-positive margin for the ethanol produced. Everywhere else it's a subsidised net energy loss--you use more petroleum products fertilizing, transporting product, and moving water than you save with the ethanol generated.

My country tis of thee, sweet land of subsidy.

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[longhairedgnome]

Same effect you get from all the corn products you eat?

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[delinear]

What's to say they're not already doing that? If a significant portion of readers prefer electronic versions and a similarly significant portion prefer dead tree editions then the smart move would be to cater to both markets, not just tell the dead tree people to move with the times and dump them. And as to why they prefer dead tree editions, any number of valid reasons, maybe it's easier to relax with a magazine than with a laptop or eReader, maybe they like to stick it in a back pocket while out in the field so they can read it over lunch without worrying about it breaking or getting lost, maybe they just prefer to read articles on paper. I'm sure a good percentage of the readership here still prefer books to eReaders, and this is hardly a site with a luddite leaning.

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[twitcher101]

So are farmers smart enough to know that if you kill nematodes, you kill the soil and are therefore fully dependent on chemical companies if you want to keep farming? Are they smart enough to know that you should NEVER use this product? Most I have talked to lately insist its impossible to produce food without chemicals, which just isn't true. In fact, most studies show that the surpluses would be larger without chemicals limiting the environment. We might have to eat more than five crops and not use corn in everything (but then it isn't in ANY of my cookbooks, so why is corn syrup in all my food?). Unfortunately, your examples above of early adoption suggest that farmers go for "shiny" things, rather than useful tech. Try getting them to adopt precision fertilization using GPS, and they balk, because it isn't about the environment, its only about yield maps. So the shiny advert will convince them to make the soil into a barren substrate...

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[caseih]

"Studies" apparently show lots of things. Most of the problems you mention are well-known, (even by us farmers), and are caused largely by unwise government subsidies. Obviously the farm bill is pushed by American farmers (of which I am not), and of course EU farmers, which is definitely short-sighted.

As for precision fertilizer, you are quite mistaken. Farmers are jumping at the bit to do this sort of thing, but so far it's just not economical yet. I can easily meter an average fert rate across my 52' drill, but doing individual runs is more complicated than you think. But the technology is coming soon, and I will definitely be adopting it when it's feasible, technologically and economically. I've seen a fertilizer bill as high as $250,000 for 2500 acres. Don't you think I'd like to reduce that? The primary motivation isn't shiny things, but reducing costs which almost always equals reducing environmental footprint.

Old, August 2009 we had almost the same article

[Teferison]

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

Cool tech

[wvmarle]

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!

Excellent!

[naich]

Sounds to me like a good source of cheap screens to hack and use with your favourite microcontroller.