Dish Networks locks horns with broadcasters over ad skipping In the latest episode of the US ad-skipping saga, Dish Networks is facing the wrath of broadcasters such as NBC and Fox, but winning praise from customers and no doubt causing a little churn among competitors. That at least is the intention of the Dish PVR ad skipping feature called Auto Hop, with the company gambling that the …
"Not to knock Americans at all here, but it's just soooo FUC*KING-IN-YOUR-FACE! It's like the drill sergeant standing an inch away, and yelling at you at the top of his voice. Muppet. After all, what nation came up with unanted pop-ups? Take Windows-xp as an example. Every time I boot, dozens of little balloons appear telling me (I kid you not, on my machine anyway) "New hardware detected: Disk drive" "New hardware detected: CD ROM" etc."
Why? Because these kinds of adverts were BORN in America. As a result, Americans have been exposed to so much of it that they become innured, meaning advertisers need flashier and flashier ways to get your attention. And it's been this way for a LONG time. I recall a chapter in a science fiction novel in which a billboard gets someone's attention by a major light show. The novel was E. E. Smith's "First Lensman," a book Older Than Television, yet it shows the kind of thinking advertisers faced then AND now: how do you draw the attention of people who otherwise wouldn't want anything to do with you (or to paraphrase from a certain TV infomercial, how do you make the fish bite when it isn't hungry)?
Spot on! If you're watching Free To Air then it has to be paid for somehow, licence fee and advertising are the current solutions. If you're paying for content then it shouldn't be interrupted every couple of minutes by idiots telling you what to spend your money on. I've already chosen to spend my money on the content so go away and let me enjoy it!
Same goes for the annoying shouty people who tell you what you should watch next as soon as the credits start to roll. I can make my own mind up, thank you, I do know how to use the EPG! And I'd rather savour the content and see who made it, rather than have it squeezed to a microdot while you force-feed me the tat no-one really wants to watch.
Another strong contender in the annoying stakes is the BBC3 habit of interrupting long-running content (usually feature films) to give you five minutes of fatuous Sleb-n-Sport news in the middle.
Does some imbecile at the BBC imagine that viewers actually like commercial breaks? Or is it because BBC3 viewers are too weak in the brain or bladder to last through a 90-minute film?
I had thought buying the DVD would be a reliable way to avoid adverts, but I find all the trailers, animated logos, and exhortations to buy rather than steal, take so long that I put the DVD on with the sound down and go off to make a cup of tea. I have a sickening prescience of such extras developing the need for me to nudge them out of an endless loop (1), or adverts being reinserted in the main content.
Is it my fault because I buy cheap DVDs? Tell me there are up-market DVDs that have less intrusion. I somehow doubt it.
Ad skipping could translate to copying the DVD's main content. Naturally I resent the cost of a DVD-R and the time taken. No doubt that is already illegal (in the UK, but not with USA's fair use policy?), and I now predict measures taken by the DVD manufacturers to make this awkward.
(1) Sorry: perhaps I should not have put that idea in writing
My Sony box has skips that start with 30 sec forward or 5 sec back; perfect for ad avoidance. It also has an "insert chapter marker at scene change" that actually only inserts the markers to bracket the ad breaks, at least on channels that aren't too compressed such as Film 4. The only ads that ever get seen if its misfired occasionally are the "sponsor" ads that bookend the ad break, which must be about the last desirable piece of property in TV ad land.
Sony did produce a VCR that automatically ignored ads in the late 80s (I think), and only for the japanese market. It worked on the signal that preceded the start and end of the break. After the predictable uproar, IIRC the channels just changed the signal to something it didn't recognize.
It was Grundig, it used the hidden teletext pages that were used to signal the start of a commercial break. Funnily enough the IBA didn't like this idea. It's all going with this digital stuff - or you could look for the marker in the corner of the screen going off with a 5 second time to hit the pause on record.
I seem to recall in a sci-fi film "blipverts" that were so fast you subliminally saw them before you could hit the remote. Maybe they'll go this way soon.
someone is going to whine on about the licence fee for BBC....
I read all this and say "Thank god for ....."
We have no cable in this (insert small town on outskirts of south Manchester, UK) so no TiVo to skip ads. Refused for 10+ years to support Murdoch in any way so Sky Box is out. My ad skipping is MythTV all the way - it works - and boy, am I glad to free from the shouting idiocy that are adverts...
I agree with you, I'm happy to pay my TV license, it gives me plenty of content I enjoy, and I include Radio in that as well.
I won't pay for SKY, because it has adverts.. If it was Ad Free, i'd be happy to pay, but I won't pay for ads..
There is plenty on Free Sat that I can enjoy, and the adverts are not THAT bad if your not watching ITV....
Television advertising revenue in the UK = £4.36bn in 2011 / 25 million homes in the UK
So to replace that advertising revenue, you would need another £174* on the licence fee, to be distributed across all the channels. That's just £14.50 a month on top of your "service provider" fees - BBC licence + Sky subs
*Call it £200, as the ad + trailer time MUST be replaced with actual programs!
It would be more expensive in the US:
US advertising revenues in 2011 = $171.7 billion / 160 million homes = $1000 p.a.
More reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom#Licence_fee_expenditure
BBC: £145.50 for colour * 25 million homes in the UK = £3.6 billion in 2010 => 2.4bn on TV (66% of BBC revenue on ad-free TV). A bit expensive for just 2 ad-free channels?!
>>> BBC: £145.50 for colour * 25 million homes in the UK = £3.6 billion in 2010 => 2.4bn on TV (66% of BBC revenue on ad-free TV). A bit expensive for just 2 ad-free channels?!
Well, four. And six national radio channels, and a heap of local radio stations, and t'internet site, and the iPlayer...
And to be honest, no, not expensive at all. Problem is you get to pay the advertising costs whether you watch commercial TV or not, or indeed even if you don't have a TV, since it can be assumed to apply to pretty much any product you buy... the deal with the BBC is that you pay, and you get content. The deal with commercial channels is that the programme is intended to entice me to watch the adverts... but there's no contract with me, even implicitly.
I've said it before (and got downvoted for it) but I'll say it again: advertising is an attempt to steal my time. If I want something, I'll search; if I don't, why would an advert persuade me? Advertising is an increasingly nonsensical way of funding 'entertainment'.
"I've said it before (and got downvoted for it) but I'll say it again: advertising is an attempt to steal my time. If I want something, I'll search; if I don't, why would an advert persuade me? Advertising is an increasingly nonsensical way of funding 'entertainment'."
There's no such thing as a free ride. You either pay out of your pocket or pay with your time. it'd be interesting to see the time-to-money ratio for current network television.
Advertising in general is a waste of time. As you said, if I want a product I'll search around and word of mouth is more important to me than advertising.
I used to work for a now defunct crap computer maker (named after something that a clock helps you with) and we were once told their stats on adverts. It was £50 per customer footfall and another £150 per computer sale. That's a large chunk of the margin so it was no wonder we were pushed to sell the extended warranties. I guess they were making a loss on a base computer sale. Coupled with that, the computers sold were shite. Factory refurbed and refitted HDDs in new units. They were sold on the basis of advertising alone, while I knew full well where you could buy from a local supplier for the same money and actually get some decent kit.
Now to companies who famously don't advertise; Bentley and Rolls Royce. You heard of them?
If a product is good enough on terms of quality and price you'll have customers beating a path to your door. If your product is sub-standard, you need to advertise.
I agree entirely. See my previous comments on ad-free internet browsing...
But I don't know of *any* TV channel which is run entirely by subscription; that is, with no money from anywhere else in the organisation, no friendly plugs in the same company's newspapers, no support from other channels in the same bundle, no shared infrastructure/staffing costs. Doesn't mean there isn't one, but in thirty years of working in the industry I never came across one.
I'm a huge fan of the BBC (I worked there over thirty years) but I'll be the first to admit it's expensive - but also that a lot the cost is internal administration which is a relic of John Birt's attempts to kill it. But I really don't think that there is any way you could fund the BBC (or a similar ad-free system) on a per-program subscription model; you need to buy the whole package. If the BBC ever went that way you could say goodbye to BBC3, 4, and probably BBC2, Radio 3, local radio... it needs the many to support the few. Whether that's a good idea or not is of course political, irrespective of my views on it!
Actually, the £2.4Bn _is_ for TV; The other £1.2Bn covers the other media. So you get 4 ad-free channels + content for about £100 p.a. The point of my post was that for an extra £200 p.a. (we) could replace advertising revenue with subscription revenue and have dozens of ad-free channels showing quality original content from around the world. Which _does_ make the BBC look expensive.
As to the cost of advertising being included in the product - Unfortunately ad-free TV wouldn't eliminate advertising agencies, but it might make them pay more to create an interesting ad* ** and pay more for the limited TV slots that wanted to use the ad-revenue model - Keeping up the revenue and enabling creation of more quality content.
*If I recall correctly, it used to cost about £1m to create an ad and £0.25m per showing in peak time; So skimping on the creation was a false saving.
** How about the ASA being the judge of "good" ads? If viewers complain that an ad is boring, they could prevent it being shown again :-)
Absolutely agreed on the purpose of advertising; It's fine if you don't have access to a search engine when you think "I want a widget that does X and Y"; It's OK if you live in a cave and never thought of X and Y as being useful. But as the best advertising is word of mouth (enhanced by t'internet), the old Awareness/Interest/Desire/Action model is only effective on a limited % of the viewers
@tfewster: "(we) could replace advertising revenue with subscription revenue and have dozens of ad-free channels showing quality original content from around the world. Which _does_ make the BBC look expensive."
The key phrase is "quality original content". There's plenty of junk on BBC, but I still think it's reasonable value. As far as I'm concerned, the quality of most of the content on the commercial channels is pretty much worth what I pay for it - nothing. Put it another way, there are rarely any programmes that are good enough to justify having to see the ads. The sole exception, oddly enough, is Dave, the channel of last resort. But a lot of Dave's content originated on the BBC anyway.
Another post equates the ads to "paying with your time" for content. I'm paid by the day, so I know exactly what my time is worth, and an evening of ITV programmes doesn't come near.
I don't get it. This functionality is available with an add-on in Windows Media Centre, MythTV and other hardware based DVRs. I don't see how content providers can complain that they are automatically fast forwarding through certain sections.
They are not changing the program, since all of the program is still there and still recorded. They are merely automatically skipping bits of it. You can still watch them if you want to, its just a feature to avoid bits of it.
Because in ad-supported TV, the Ads are the most important part. Put it this way: the show is just show, the ads are the dough (the TV show COSTS the network, but the embedded ads bring in sponsor revenue to make up the difference). If sponsors get wind of more people using ad-skippers, they'll pressure the producers and cut the money they pay out for sponsoring the show (since they're not getting as much ad exposure back as before). IOW, the networks are being pressured to fight this tech by their sponsors.
If I understand the technology correctly, the person records a TV show with commercials. Upon playing back, they have the ability to push a button and skip the commercials, right?
The technology uses the fact that there is a signal embedded in the stream that is used to indicate when a commercial is supposed to play. (This allows for National or Local commercials to be played.)
In addition, its possible that if the user is watching an OnDemand cable show, that one could replace the initial ad with one that is more targeted to the viewer or is more relevant. Like replacing a President's day sale, when the show is watched after sale had ended.)
So the underlying stream which is recorded is not changed in any manner.
Taken from a NY Times article:
"That’s why the feature does not start working until two hours after the end of prime time each day, he said, and why the ads are preserved on the recording. (They’re hidden, however, because the Dish software knows when to skip over them.) "
So the legality of this technology shouldn't be questioned on the grounds that they are violating copyright infringement. They are merely taking advantage of the feature built in to the signal itself.
How is this for programming stupidity. I'm in Australia and I watch Formula 1. It's on a commercial channel. Being a commercial channel, I presume it must run commercials. But, they don't run money raising commercials, they run programme promotion ones. Not just any old programme promotion, oh no, they run kids show ones. But, they don't have a lot of kids shows, so they run the same ones three times each. Honest, I'm not kidding. Advertising kids shows during a Grand prix, that really is getting to the heart of the target audience eh.
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Why is that a fail? There are still many areas where internet services are not up to a suitable standard to allow everybody to stream everything all of the time. The ISPs complain enough just about the BBC iplayer.
That aside, you must be in the US if you are streaming legally. You must be in the US. As it stands there is currently no way to legally stream the majority of programs in the UK as the networks won't allow services like Hulu to stream to us. Yes there are certain services like iplayer and 4od but as our networks buy a lot of programs from the US there is an awful lot we can't watch without turning to illegal services and so the law, stupid as it is makes criminals out of people who just want to watch a tv show.
Depends where you live... in the UK many areas are still stuck on upto 8 meg ADSL on exchanges that are not only heavily congested, but have a premium priced bandwidth over the newer faster services (The scam here is "leverage pricing" ignoring the fact that BTs own lack of investment in upgrades means there is nowhere to lever people to... contracted bandwidth pricing on 8 meg IPSC is £122 per Mbps compared to just £40 per Mbps for the newer upto 24 Mbps WBC service.
Streaming is no fun over a congested exchange, add to that the lower bandwidth caps invariably applied to 8 meg services you might have a clue why streaming isn't happening on a huge scale for people in many areas. The BT ads might shout about fibre speed but for many stuck on BT wholesale services the reality is still the same out of date crawl that they have had for the last 10 years.
One of the reasons we all jumped to Facebook from mySpace was the ads - they were much more discreet on FB, but this also meant that FB's ads were much less effective, so FB had to resort to more... er... 'artful' ways of making money.
So, if you think product placements are bad now, just wait until the TV networks can't make anything on regular advertising because of tech like this.
What gets me, in this wizzo technological day and age, is that Sky seem intent on not doing something that might* get them more money - provide both a free advert version, and a subscription 'non-advert'** version of each channel. The programmes on the subscription version start later, and have adverts _between_ the programmes only, but this allows programmes on both versions to finish at the same time. This way, it's up to the viewer to decide whether they want the free ride with adverts getting in the way, or the pay form with the adverts out of the way of the programmes themselves.
As for ad-skipping, I have a Humax Freeview PVR (getting quite old now admittedly, it doesn't even have an HDMI output, only a scart!) that has time adjustable skipping settings that are accessed by buttons on the remote to skip forwards or backwards. So not exactly new, and certainly there seems to be no legal block on them in the UK. I don't know if the latest models still have them though.
One thing that doesn't seem to have been mentioned so far is that most broadcast advertising doesn't get people to buy a product, and this has been known for some time. It just raises awareness of the existence of products, and most people either don't remember the adverts, or skip or ignore them anyway. In the future, the only way advertising will really be workable is if it can be directed to those people specifically interested in a product at the time they are looking into it. The only current way that is done is with things like Gongle and Biog searches that have sponsored ads alongside the search results.
* I haven't done the maths, so don't know if they'd screw up their income or not
** OK, so there are adverts, but that's just to pad out the dead air between programmes
Time was when TV advertising was rather good and done responsibly but these days, perhaps because of the arrival of dozens of cheap channels, the viewer is not treated with any respect at all.
Adverts used to be preceded with with an "End of part..." message but then they started cutting in without warning and then a further step was to cut in during an important bit of dialogue. No matter that Poirot is about to tell you the butler didn't do it, if 12 minutes have elapsed since the last break then wallop!
And if you decide to pre-record all your favourite shows so that you can skip the four minute advert breaks, the bastards try to wind you up by making some of them 3 or 5 minute slots.
Shows are hacked to bits in order to fit the extended advert slots and TV companies daren't waste precious airtime to tell you what's on next so they paste it all over the climax of the show you've tuned in to watch!.
I'm pretty sure that when Alfred Hitchcock was planning his breathtaking and frightening cinematography he didn't envisage some poxy computer graphic popping up to tell viewers there's a new season of Celebrity Dancing Chef Apprentice starting soon.
Oh and just in case you're too brain dead to know what channel you're watching and don't know which button to press to find out, there's a big multicoloured glowing channel logo superimposed on Captain Picard's forehead like an Amy Winehouse tattoo.
You Tube is full of postings of classic adverts that people are actually watching with a sense of nostalgia. Today's adverts just make you say "Oh F...F... S... not again, where's the remote".
It's war I tell ya!
The old episodes of The Sweeney and Minder on ITV 4 are quite telling. Despite being produced with adverts in mind, ITV4 show so many adverts they have to hack an additional 4 or so minutes from each episode. This is often done with all the skill and finesse of a one armed drunken man with a chainsaw.
Mind you, UK Gold used to change all the advert slots in Minder so you'd hear the theme cutting in at the start of a scene where previously there was a break.
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Surely insering adverts into films is changing content and therefore a breach of copyright in itself? I have never knowingly bought anything because it was advertised on TV. Indeed the TV ads are the biggest turn off in my opinion. They are like the cold caller that rings your doorbell while you are in the middle of dinner, or repairing something. Usually the second word is -off.
A Personal Video Recorder right?
what the hell is personal about it?
"personal stereo" - yes , makes sense
"personal computer" , also maks sense
the way its used in PVR is just stupid , it makes as much sense as "I'm off home in our personal car to to make dinner in our pesonal oven to eat while watchig my personal TV"
Excellent book called "The Intention Economy" by one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. All PVR customers skip adverts; they've already voted. All's left is the advertising industry who are still trying to push output customers don't need nor want. Time for them to rationalise their business model; behaving like dinosaurs is not a useful long term strategy for their ultimate survival.
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