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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.'"
I work in the advertising industry and it is outrageous how far people can go to abuse others. It isn't free to make all those good tv shows and in my opinion authors should get paid for them. Mostly this is based on advertising on TV. If you don't want advertising, go buy the DVD boxes which don't have them. But have some decency and let people get paid for their hard work. Dish Network is bunch of assholes.
Fine but don't then fill the DVD's with crap about piracy and advertising other shows, I just bought them to avoid getting the actual show I want to see in an uninterrupted format, let me have it!
Common sense is not so common
Slashdot is also almost completely supported by advertising. As many users on this site block them, they have moved to more subtle advertising like paid stories on Ask Slashdot, sponsored polls and their jobs site. All you are doing is shooting yourself in the leg. Moves like this will only introduce more subtle advertising, using psychological ways like those 0.1s flashes of products in between and product placement. Is that better then? Now you at least know when you are being advertised something. Then you won't, but your mind will, subliminally.
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.
F*ck that noise. This isn't about being paid for hard work, this is negotiations over just how badly they can sell the customer.
If a TV network has the option of providing a show, and making $40 million off of it (ad free), or $60 million off of it (with ads), they will always choose the latter. As both the customers, as well as the eyeballs being sold (thanks guys), we have the right to tell them that it's enough. Enough of these ads, enough of the chronically shortened programming, enough of the bullsh*t where you trot out an actor earning $500,000 / episode, and tell the rest of us that the network will go bankrupt if they listened to the viewers for once in their goddamn lives.
And while we are on the topic, bring back Firefly.
I am John Hurt.
Exactly, how is it abuse to skip commercials on recorded content? I do understand that that the producers need money, but you can not force viewers to watch content they do not want to see. Do you want to make it illegal to go to the loo during the commercial break as well? Perhaps the producers could try a humble attitude and a "Donate" button instead of advertising companies?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
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)
I work in the advertising industry...
Not for long.
When cable TV was originally created, it was promoted as an advertisement-free alternative to regular TV. The subscription fee was the replacement to advertising revenue. Many people seem to have forgotten that -- today, it's just a foregone conclusion that you have to suffer advertising on everything. But it's a lie; And if there's millions of viewers on DishTV's network, then it doesn't matter how loudly advertisers scream... Dish can just pay the content producers directly and tell them to suck dick. The only one that loses here are advertisers who have to suck dick instead of forcing theirs down their subscriber's throats. :O
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
The problem isn't just the commercials, it's all the annoying ads in the lower corners of my screen, advertising all the other shows they produce. It distracts from the show I'm watching, and sometimes it blocks something I needed to see that was relevant to the show I was supposed to be focusing on. The networks are shoving more and more advertising down our throats and people are tired of it. Personally I would rather product placement, as long as it isn't the 1950's cheesy way, I'd rather see a Budweiser than a can that says "beer". The 'stars' and the executives are all paid too much and the majority of shows suck. Let's not even talk about reality shows, I really doubt those cost a fortune to make. So I will restate the earlier post "cry me a river"
If dish can skip content then there is no reason why they can't replace content. THey could start inserting their own ads.
Also as far as implementing this goes, there's no need to auto-detect commercials. just pay some mechanical Turk to do it. sounds like an easy job to watch say 8 hours of TV and mark the commercials. It's only 4 or 5 channels so that's like 20 people to pay.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The real problem for most people is that advertising never ends, it never seems to be enough. For Americans it might just always have been there, I am old enough and European enough there are alternatives. Germany has a very odd mechanic where they seems to show all the ads on one TV station for about half an hour and that is it. Belgium occasionally has one. The BBC has none and Dutch TV didn't have to use any on Sunday so they had to add cartoons to make programs run a full hour. Battle Star Galactica (The original) followed by Bugs Bunny and then the news.
But if you watch some American TV (and may god have mercy on your soul) you will see ads EVERYWHERE, every five minutes, they have popups during the program, on the first seconds as the program comes back on after a commercial block and in the program itself. The logic seems to be that if 1 ad works, a 100 will work even better.
The reasoning when applied to sex (hey, I can't always use car anologies) would be that since your gf likes a small penis inside, she would REALLY like a big one so why not have her fucked by a whale and make her really happy. And then you wonder why she ain't happy, because you just make your gf explode into a thousand gooey bits from being banged by a volkswagen (oh okay, one car analogy) sized penis! HAPPY?
It as as when your gf asks you to spank her, what she means is that she wants you to make her hiny glow a nice pink color. NOT to beat her until she is a thin red paste on the wall and the cops are hauling you away, yet again (and now you know why on /. we use car analogies, because the other kind are just to revealing of the inner workings of the average analogy using slashdotter). There is a line between advanced sex play and first degree murder and there is a line between advertising that works and advertising that doesn't work because there is just to fucking much of it.
People are lazy, that can lead you to believe you can push them and stop until they start to react. The problem is that while people have a great deal of inertia, once they stop moving, they are unstoppable. Once people have started using time-shifting and ad-blockers, you can't get them to stop again. I started using ad blocking because a series of ads just pissed me off enough to take the effort and now all ads are blocks and screw you if your website dies because of it.
I think the real problem is that TV execs don't eat their own dog shit (calling TV food is just to ridiculous) they don't have to sit through their own ads to watch their own content. They don't get just how fucking annoying it gets and the people that stop watching don't show up on their statistics until suddenly, advertising on TV doesn't have as much effect in generating sales. You can see it in the advertising industry, they know they aren't reaching customers anymore but are at a loss of coming up with a solution. There are still viewers but they are the cattle that lack the income/knowledge to go elsewhere, the high income viewers are gone, unreachable. So... MORE ADS! That will get them back!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yeah I think advertising has a place: free TV.
I think it's outrageous that Dish has to *pay* local companies for the right to broadcast what the Over-The-Air companies give away for free.
The local affiliates' demands for payment for acting as essentially a beneficial service was always an unreasonable accommodation. I fully support Dish giving the local channels the giant middle finger by cutting off their revenue stream for those customers.
They can either be happy that Dish is spreading their marketing sponsored content or they can charge Dish for the rights to broadcast it commercial free. I don't see why they get to do both.
The TV shows on The Pirate Bay will have all the obnoxious shit cut out, once again giving pirates a better product than paying (ad-watching) customers.
This is the Internet age. You only need one bored nerd to manually cut ads, crop video, edit the soundtrack and start a torrent.
Desperation is a stinky cologne.
Nobody is going to have any sympathy for you because you need to realize one simple immutable fact:
nobody wants the shit you are responsible for making. nobody. everybody hates you with the burning passion of a thousand suns. the only way for you to get advertisements in front of people is by the lack of choice .
Therefore, you are already deeply unethical in any attempt to sue somebody out of existence like Dish Network that is providing what the customer wants (Sonicblue), and deeply disturbed and sociopathic with your successful attempt to ruin television with disruptive overlays during programming.
The only way you can survive is by continuing to make sure the consumer has the lack of choice, and then you sit there with the unmitigated gall to complain when choice is provided.
Get a clue. Get a different career. I suggest Ambulance Chasing Lawyer or the guys who provide fresh meat for Hostel-like entertainment packages in Eastern European countries. You know.... something with a little more heart.
Cable companies are just distributors, not show producers, yet they're always referring to their pay-TV as a "product". How is that any different than pirates offering the same "product" as television without ads delivered over the Internet for free?
The alternative explanation is that he's getting his needs met on a regular basis by an attractive woman. How's your sex life these days?
Write failed: Broken pipe
Ads on the Internet were interesting 10-15 years ago... Small static banners advertising stuff that might even be relevant for a student/nerd like me at that time. Today they lie ("You have won!", "You may be at risk..." etc.), flash, jump, shake, slide over content etc. and that beyond obnoxious. I now block it all and it's their loss. If they behaved I probably wouldn't be so likely to do it. The so-called 'targeted advertising' simply doesn't work - for me at least. Whenever I happen to unblock ads or surf from other machines, the ads are all over the place, usually thinking I'm either a pregnant woman or a handyman, both of which are unbelievably off the mark.
I also block telemarketers and paper ads in my mailbox, using relevant signup services.
Ads on TV are even worse. Once in a full moon someone makes a good or funny television ad, but they rarely stand the test of being repeated 6-10 times each hour...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Ads on the Internet were interesting 10-15 years ago... Small static banners advertising stuff that might even be relevant for a student/nerd like me at that time. Today they lie ("You have won!", "You may be at risk..." etc.), flash, jump, shake, slide over content etc. and that beyond obnoxious.
Sorry, but even back then they were obnoxious. There was like maybe a year of ads that were like you describe, then it quickly degenerated into crap "Punch the monkey!" type ads, animated images, flash animations, pop-ups, pup-unders, and sound. By 1999 it was already a cesspit.
Whenever I happen to unblock ads or surf from other machines, the ads are all over the place
Same here. The unfiltered Internet is always a shock to me.
0.1s flashes of products...Now you at least know when you are being advertised something. Then you won't, but your mind will, subliminally.
Someone in the advertising industry should know that that particular type of subliminal advertising has been proven in every experiment to not work. If its too fast for the viewer to notice consciously, he has not noticed it period. So be my guest and waste your client's money.
Moves like this will only introduce more subtle advertising, using...product placement. Is that better then?
YES. A thousand times yes. Product placement can even make a show BETTER. Ever seen a character in a movie order a "soda" at a restaurant? Or walk into a bar and tell the bartender, "give me a beer"? That has always annoyed the crap out of me. If you do that in real life, you'll be asked, "what beer do you want, moron?"
Does it bother me that in Spider-Man, Parker pulled a can of Dr Pepper with his web while practicing? No, I have cans of soda around in my room, I'm not weirded out that Parker drinks that particular soda. I watch tv shows and see that prop departments make cereal boxes and soda cans with fictitious brands that have a similar look to real brands. Why instead of wasting money just not get paid to display the real stuff?
It's like the difference between those annoying flash ads and the google texts ads. The tv ads are like the flash ads. They block the content you want to see, are loud and obnoxious. The product placement is just there in the background, and you get to continue watching your show, like the google text ads are, just to the side in the sidebar. The first type, I will block every time. The second is absolutely fine with me.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.