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Dish Network Announces Prime Time TV With No Ads
Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes reports that Dish Network has announced a new feature called called Auto Hop for its satellite TV subscribers that will let you automatically skip all commercials for prime time television from the four major broadcast networks — when you watch programs the day after they are first aired. 'Viewers love to skip commercials,' says Vivek Khemka, vice president of DISH Product Management. 'With the Auto Hop capability of the Hopper, watching your favorite shows commercial-free is easier than ever before.' Craig Moffett says it's going to be hard for Dish to maintain good relationships with its programming affiliates when they start offering a feature intended to cut out the bulk of the affiliates' revenues. Whether the auto-skip feature can withstand legal challenge remains to be seen. 'Given the already long list of industry-unfriendly features promoted by Dish, one wonders if Auto Hop will be the final straw that provokes legal action from the broadcast networks,' says Moffett. 'We suspect Auto Hop probably uses some sort of bookmarking insertion based on automated recognition of commercial inserts (called "fingerprinting'"), which if true could certainly be argued to be a manipulation of the content stream by the distributor.'"
Look.. if you give me free content, pay for it with advertising. If I pay you for content..or like Dish does, then cram your advertising..k?
I am old enough to remember when cable was new and shiny. At first I was..wow! Great! I pay you and I get to see shows without commercials right? Bzzzt.. no.. I get to pay you AND see commercials..how silly of me.
Personally, I would rather pay and watch 98% pure crap than "prime" content with 3-4-5 minutes of ads blaring every 10 minutes. For me..yes..I would pay for you to just go away.
I had a ReplayTV years ago that did this, which used to be a competitor for Tivo until they lost the pricing war (didn't take long!). Actually until a few months ago I still used it regularly to tape standard def TV shows, but then my "lifetime" subscription ran out... (let THAT be a lesson to you)
Anyway they had two incredible features on these boxes, from around 2003 until the service shut down. The first was commercial skipping, which worked reasonably well. The second was the ability to share recorded shows. Several communities sprung up around this capability, so you could request a show that you had missed from someone else who had taped it.
Predictably they were sued and that did not help their already troubled business model. But it's not such a new thing for commercial skip to be available in COTS consumer devices. And man I miss it!
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
Doesn't Dish already pay licensing fees to the networks as well?
Exactly.
Dish pays millions of dollars a year to the networks for the "right" to carry their programs. If Dish completely cuts out commercials on every channel they carry, the networks still get money.
I visited the US once, a few years ago, and made the mistake of trying to watch a movie on TV there. It was unwatchable. Every ten minutes or so, a break for five minutes of advertising. Completly ruined the mood.
I was also surprised by the number of pharmacutical adverts I saw. Over here in the UK, direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs is prohibited.