Dish Network Announces Prime Time TV With No Ads 283
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.'"
Re:I work in the advertising industry (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
ReplayTV (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:licensing fees? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Replacement advertising. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:licensing fees? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I work in the advertising industry (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it is not free to make TV shows but the end broadcasters pay the producers to make them in order to fill broadcast hours and provide a vehicle for their revenue earner: advertising. The broadcasters are in turn paid for the insertion of advertising material into their transmission, and by re-broadcasters. This advertising is sold on the basis of the number of eyeballs that could potentially see it since there is no accurate measure of the number of people that actually see it (live or delayed), and even less of a measure of those that actually absorb it. That potential number of people is completely unchanged by this action which is, ultimately, no different to people using DVR skip, making a coffee, surfing the 'net, or having a pee during the advertising breaks. Everybody in that chain is fully paid by the time of broadcast except the end viewer who, understandably, does not feel in the slightest guilty for not watching the advertising material. This is also the end viewer who, having paid for a DVD box set, would still be bombarded by unskippable warnings containing half-truths that effectively call them a 'thief' and, in many cases, advertising. The industry is, as usual, trying to have its cake, eat its cake, and have a piece of everyone else's cake too.
If a legal challenge is mounted on the basis that creating external metadata, such as an index of positions in the stream, is a breach of copyright in the stream then it will be one of the more memorable attempts to overreach copyright law. If such a thing were allowed to stand then the act of creating an index card for a DVD library listing the length of the feature and extras would be a copyright violation, bookmarking a position in a movie your are watching would be a violation: clearly an idiotic proposition and counter to the public interest. I suspect, as usual, copyright holders will attempt to circumvent the actual copyright law by using contracts to do an end-run.
Re:Advertising never ends (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I work in the advertising industry (Score:5, Interesting)
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.