Broadcast Industry Wades In On Dish Network's Hopper 194
gollum123 writes "As with past technological threats, network executives are closing ranks against a Dish Network device that undermines the broadcast business model. The disruptive technology at hand is an ad-eraser, embedded in new digital video recorders sold by Charles W. Ergen's Dish Network, one of the nation's top distributors of TV programming. Turn it on, and all the ads recorded on most prime-time network shows are automatically skipped, no channel-flipping or fast-forwarding necessary. Some reviewers have already called the feature, called the Auto Hop, a dream come true for consumers. But for broadcasters and advertisers, it is an attack on an entrenched television business model, and it must be strangled, lest it spread elsewhere."
Re:Don't do that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dish has already had the ability to skip forward in 30-second intervals on their DVR anyway... the only diff is that now you can completely avoid catching a glimpse of an advert. It's part of why I rarely bother with live TV anymore (outside of the local news stations, anyway) - I'll just DVR what I want in advance, and watch that.
As for the channel owners? Screw 'em. I'm sorry, but I already pay for the service, and paid a bit extra for the channels. Why the hell should I be forced to become a source of further income to them?
Either pay or ads (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm from Europe, but aren't you paying for receiving Dish?
From my standpoint: Either pay or ads, but never both.
The pay-TV in Europe is ad-free (well, at least during the show), pay-TV companies are treating their customers like dirt. Free-TV is rich, has many consumers, but is continuously degrading in quality (both the kind of content, and amount of ads) since 15 years.
Re:Then maybe they shouldn't charge CATV/Sat (Score:5, Insightful)
Local broadcasts are free. Well sort of. You can still get over the air local channels most places but maybe 80-90%+ of people receive their local channels through cable tv, satellite, fios, whatever.
These companies can't just tap into the local airwaves and rebroadcast these channels. They have to pay for it and ever year or so there's a major issue with the contract of some channel holding out for more money.
Which just illustrates the extreme level of greed in the TV industry. The old days of free TV supported entirely by commercials is gone. All of the cable and satellite companies must pay many millions of dollars a year to every network if they want to carry their programming. Add it all up and it easily runs into many billions of dollars. The fact is, you could completely eliminate commercials from TV and the networks would still make an enormous amount of money from broadcast fees, syndication, dvd sales, etc.
Of course, in Hollywood, no amount of money is ever enough.
Does anyone remember... (Score:4, Insightful)
Commercial for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Business model tired, worn out?
Unable or too lazy to come up with new ideas?
Loaded down with cash from when consumers had to take it your way or hit the highway?
If this describes you, call 1-800-BUYCONGRESS.
We'll do ALL we can to screw over you customers and keep your worn-out way of thinking in the public eye.
Cause everyone else is obviously a pirate or a terrorist!
BUY A CONGRESSMAN TODAY!
Hulu disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but I've noticed that over time, the ads have gotten longer and longer. When I started watching Hulu way back when, most ads were only 15 seconds long. Now, it's quite common to get 1:00 ad breaks, and I've had some go as long as 2:00 (and I'm not talking about the ones that sometimes pop up at the beginning of shows that let you watch the rest ad-free, these are in mid-show). Plus, they've started playing around with stuff that requires you to interact with the ad, such as the "Which ad experience would you prefer?" (I don't CARE, it's all just noise to me.) Or the "Which of these movies have you seen in the past seven days?" interstitials.
It's not surprising, since Hulu is owned by the broadcasters. Still, I was hoping that they would keep the ads short and really be revolutionary. When they were, I actually diligently tuned in to all of them because 1) I felt kind of obligated to since they were providing a valuable service, 2) they were MUCH less obtrusive, and 3) with a 15-second ad, you really don't have much time to do anything else. Now, though, I regularly walk away from the computer for a few minutes, then backtrack to where the show picks back up, kind of like how when ads come on "regular" television (which I hardly ever watch), I would get up and get a drink or go to the bathroom.
Oh well, just goes to prove yet again that there is little that is cool that Hollywood can't screw up royally.
Re:Don't do that. (Score:2, Insightful)
As long as you don't mind the cost increase due to the lack of ad revenue, that's all good. I'd pay Hulu if they'd sell me the ad free version, even more than what they are charging. But I won't pay for it with ads, they just literally won't offer me the service I'd pay for.
Re:Either pay or ads (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm from Europe...
I'm from America, where big corporations aren't just free, but actually expected to the point of being obligated to rake in obscene profits. There's no such thing as consumer rights here, it's all about the bottom line. They make you pay to get television, then they make advertisers pay to present it to you. Don't forget having companies pay to place their products subtly (or not-so-subtly, many times) in the shows themselves. Then you have to pay yet again if you ever want to watch it on another device or in another format, and there's a pretty durn good chance that they've sold yet more advertising, such as on Hulu, or in the form of non-skippable ads on DVDs, etc.
America used to be the land of the free. Now it's the land of the rape-everyone-for-as-much-money-as-you-can.
Re:Either pay or ads (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you can just download it off of a torrent or usenet without any of that crap. That would be wrong though, you're supposed to bend over and grab your ankles for the media companies.
Re:Don't do that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who cheat the public out of public domain media are also thieves.
Re:Don't do that. (Score:5, Insightful)
How would they have "judged" that without offering an ad-free service to see how well it's accepted?
Or perhaps they just don't give a shit what people want, because their customers are the ad advertisers, not the viewers. The people that watch Hulu are the consumables, not the consumers. Welcome to the "free market" - where you just don't get a choice. Funny how that works.
Re:Don't do that. (Score:4, Insightful)
How would they have "judged" that without offering an ad-free service to see how well it's accepted?
Or perhaps they just don't give a shit what people want, because their customers are the ad advertisers, not the viewers. The people that watch Hulu are the consumables, not the consumers. Welcome to the "free market" - where you just don't get a choice. Funny how that works.
If they need to charge a large sum, say $1000/month to make an equivalent amount of money then it's a pretty safe bet it won't be accepted. It should be pretty simple for any business to compare what they make in ad revenue, then estimate if they think they can sell it at a reasonable price or not. Of course once they get past that hurdle, a smaller company like Hulu has to worry about networks not allowing hulu to continue broadcasting if hulu is cutting out ads. DISH probably doesn't have to worry quite so much since the networks stand to loose a lot if they cut dish out of the pie, but smaller companies would be screwed in a hurry.
Re:Either pay or ads (Score:4, Insightful)
Europe is struggling because of their austerity policies. Every country to institute them is worse off than it was before. It has nothing to do with an entitlement mentality. It's all down to the absurdity of fighting high unemployment and low consumer confidence by firing people and taking away safety nets.
The time for spending cuts is when things are good. Unfortunately it is exactly those times that the political will to cut is lowest.
Re:Either pay or ads (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with profits, it means you're producing things of value effectively. The alternative is losses which means you're just wasting resources, and that's bad.
When profits do become bad is when you're using lawsuits to protect yourself against honest competition. Which is practically the whole entertainment distribution industry, software patents, and other legal monopolies.
Re:Don't do that. (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that everyone, everywhere, will take every opportunity to squeeze a buck out of every orifice they can legally get a finger in. This is why, you go to a movie for which you paid $15 dollars to see, and they subject you to 20 minutes of commercials. That is why people are driving around with advertisements on their cars. That is why if they ever figure out how to project images on the inside of contact lenses you best be prepared to be seeing commercials on them for at least an hour a day. The corporate machine is hawking its proverbial ass off and it has you square in its sights. How dare you deny them the opportunity to scream at you every waking moment of your life.
This tech isn't new by ANY means! (Score:5, Insightful)
ReplayTV had a DVR many years ago with this exact feature, and they got their asses sued off by Hollywood for it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV). The suit was never decided. It even had a feature that did the reverse, playing *only* the commercials (aka "Superbowl Mode").
But even *that* was based on earlier technology patented back in 1993 (http://www.google.com/patents/US5333091) and used in VHS machines dating about 10 years ago, maybe longer.
As a DISH subscriber, I'm happy they are finally implementing this, but they ARE going to have a fight on their hands.
Now, if only someone can invent technology to get rid of those awful graphic overlays advertising other shows/movies. And the ridiculous "OMG IT'S TOTALLY RAINING OR SOMEONE GOT ELECTED DOGCATCHER" crawls from the local news.
Re:Either pay or ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are social creatures, they usually feel more comfortable when not diverging from the social group. This has been demonstrated many times with psychological experiments where people will act against all common sense when others are setting an example to follow (see: Stanley Milgrams New Hampshire experiment, for an extreme example). Those people who wear branding and/or follow fashions slavishly are just belonging because it makes them comfortable to blend in with what everybody else is doing.
And that is why mass market advertising works too.. they show you pictures of other people doing what they want you to do, and large segments of the population follow suit.. Its not [any longer] about telling you truthfully what the benefits of this product vs that product are so that you can make a reasoned decision about which to use, it is solely about getting the images into your brain so that you prefer to use that product because you have seen other people using it.
Re:Either pay or ads (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, buddy, but you missed the train there.
We've had universal health care... I don't know. At least all my life and most if not all of the lives of my parent generation. Other countries have had it even longer. No collapse anywhere in sight. Heck, many of the social security systems in Europe survived two world wars.
The reason why some of them are collapsing now has a very different cause: The insurance industry has realized that if those social security systems weren't public, but, say, insurances, they would make billions of profits. I'm not exaggerating. The pension system alone is so massive, every insurance manager would get an instant orgasm just thinking about getting a few percentages of it.
So they did what big business does these days: Bribe the government to ruin the systems that stood for a hundred years through wars, economic collapse, everything. They couldn't take it away, because that would've lost them, well, pretty much all voters. But they've run it into the ground intentionally, blaming demographic changes and what else. None of which is true, every few years another economist publishes a paper showing that with but minor changes the public system could be adapted quite easily.
The result is that a) most of us have to take out insurance in addition to the mandatory public pension system and b) we now have something that used to be quite rare in Europe: Old people who are poor despite having worked all their lives.
As for the education - let's just say that aside from the world-famous elite universities, the american school system is the laughing stock of all the first world. One look at it and we are quite certain that we want to stick with ours, despite all its shortcomings.
Re:Don't do that. (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if anyone has studied the negative affects of advertising on potential customers? Oral B ads made me discount them completely when choosing an electric toothbrush. I definitely won't be using MoneySupermarket thanks to their campaigns. Citron's "shakin' that ass" advert put me right off the design of the car, which now only reminds me of a fat person's arse.
It seems like the "arms race" going on in advertising, particularly TV advertising, is having the opposite effect to the one intended.