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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
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)
I work in the advertising industry...
Not for long.
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"
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.
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.
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) --