Cable companies have started showing fewer ads because of Netflix | Hacker News Reader

Cable companies have started showing fewer ads because of Netflix

businessinsider.com

125 pointsra7123 comments

Aside from ads, freedom of choice with respect to just what you watch seem to be the other key motivator.

With the capability of streaming and on-demand services, why would any consumer put up with having to choose any channel with a fixed programming schedule? I almost certainly don't want to watch what you're trying to sell.

No other industry seems to operate in this manner. When it comes to books, games, music, etc, consumers choose specific products. With cable TV you don't get that granularity of choice. Netflix just brings the traditional TV model into alignment with seemingly everything else.

Anecdotally, cable prices seem to rise but the new channels that are sold to me as a benefit are the exact opposite of what I watch. More sports channels? Despite me having never tuned into a single one? If you're going to profile me, at least make an effort to do it well.

Don't forget that, as a non-sports-watcher, you get to pay a fee to subsidize all the sports channels you don't watch. It's not even the cost of the channels, per se... you get the extra "regional sports surcharge" on top of that.

I never knew about that, so thanks. This is a significant argument against the traditional cable model, at least for me.

Are there other genres (for want of a better term) where this applies?

It's around $6/month per subscriber - http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/how-much-cable-subscribers-pay-...

At least Verizon FIOS in the Boston area lets you opt-out of all sports channels so you are not charged this fee.

I imagine you're probably still subsidising the sports watchers though.

All of these companies use sports as a major buying motivator, like in the UK Sky basically went mad on buying every sport they could. I would assume the extra subscription alone doesn't cover the high licensing prices they pay, so they spread out the cost to all the other consumers too but just charge a bit extra to the sports fans.

Oddly enough, I recently moved to the Boston area (from NY) and I did not know this. I'll need to look into it. Nobody in my family has any interest in watching sports at all.

Most push media work exactly like tv. Magazines and newspapers have ads in between the content and don't forget about radio that works exactly the same.

2 points. I won't speak for myself, but from what I've gathered from friends:

1. A lot of people seem to like video ads. Movie ads specially tell you 'whats hot', and general ads put you 'in the loop' so to speak. I've tried to install ABV for a couple of people who won't let me because they actually like ads (as in youtube, not the shiny bright popups). This may be true for more people than HN crowd would assume.

2. One of the biggest problems I have with non-cable is that I need to think. When I'm with friends, we spend a very considerable amount of time trying to agree on what we want to watch, and often end up watching some stupid cute cat video because we couldn't decide. TV solves that. Perhaps if cable were referred to as 'a curated platform of best video content, being streaming 24/7', the conception would change?

I believe crowd-sourcing 'what to watch' will drive you to the lowest common denominator (cat videos). Instead, we take turns choosing. And live with what the other guys choose because, well, that's called being social. Its not too awfully painful to watch a costume drama once in a while.

Number 2 is true and very frustrating. I'd like to have a Netflix channel option. Sci-fi channel, horror channel etc. Did you ever call up someone else and tell them to turn to a channel then share in the same experience?

But there are categories like that. A recent update to Roku made them easier to get to for those devices.

One issue with this will be that so much media seems to be moving to very compelling stories, and you don't want to miss any. You used to be able to tune into the middle of a show without really missing anything.

what is abv? abp?

I've experienced #2, with Plex you can make playlists and shuffle through them though which I find mimics TV pretty well (without the ads).

I don't think that ads as a way of finding things you may be interested in is necessarily bad, but it's certainly not the only way. If I want to find out what's current or upcoming in videogames I can go to Eurogamer, Polygon, Gematsu, or another site with that kind of focus. (Actually knowing which places are best for your interests and which should be filtered out is another issue, of course...)

If a random ad happens to be something I'm curious about then great, but I find that it's more often not.

2 is a fair point, though I wonder if your shared interests as friends (making assumptions here) couldn't guide your search?

Cable as 'a curated platform of best video content, being streaming 24/7' is interesting, but the current "best" just may not be someone's thing. Again I think it comes down to wanting to choose precisely what you watch, though I see your point that you don't always know (though if you don't know what you want to watch, maybe doing something else is the option?).

>> Perhaps if cable were referred to as 'a curated platform of best video content, being streaming 24/7', the conception would change?

But the high quality content (when there is any) on cable ends up on extra channels that require you to pay more. IMHO TV was better OTA than on cable. You had a small number of local channels and they had to compete for eyeballs. Content was much better. Cable provides a way to shovel in every little crappy thing to satisfy everyone with something, and yet they still split out the best for extra money. Discovery channel split, even Disney split - which is why ratings dropped for Phinias and Ferb. Great show, but not enough pull for people to pay extra to get it, but they cancelled instead of moving it back.

> IMHO TV was better OTA than on cable. You had a small number of local channels and they had to compete for eyeballs.

OTA TV still exists and it's not bad. $15 for an antenna and I'm getting about 40 channels in Albuquerque.

Yeah... but then you have to live in Albuquerque... I don't know if good TV is worth THAT price. /s

But seriously...

I don't mind TV on a schedule SOMETIMES (Walking Dead for example was worth catching on Sunday Night... with the following Talking Dead.)

But a majority of the time, I'm doing this or that and want to catch something on my on time.

I'm not 100% against commercials, personally... but the extreme to which they went - both on TV and Online - has pushed me to be almost militantly AdBlock'ish.

If Netflix (and similar) can bring sanity back to it, all the better.

>> But a majority of the time, I'm doing this or that and want to catch something on my on time.

That's what a DVR is for. They don't actually make anything off the shelf for OTA in the US, but a bit of software and a DTV peripheral on a computer can provide this. I hear TiVo is still around, but not very popular.

TiVo is still around and handles OTA just fine, as I understand it. (I use mine with cable and never watch anything live.)

> 1. A lot of people seem to like video ads. Movie ads specially tell you 'whats hot', and general ads put you 'in the loop' so to speak. I've tried to install ABV for a couple of people who won't let me because they actually like ads (as in youtube, not the shiny bright popups). This may be true for more people than HN crowd would assume.

Don't care, let them get their trailers elsewhere. No more ads.

#2 is also solved by netflix-roulette on the 'popular' row. It's actually pretty fun!

I love that Netflix by mail logistics pushed you away from popular content , but online caching servers push you toward poplar content!

1. People like well targeted ads for their shopping intent.

2. YouTube autoplay and recommendations and subscriptions. And these days, youtube channels are even buying YouTube ads..

It astounds me how much US TV airtime is devoted to adverts - roughly 18 minutes out of every hour, AFAIK (plus any split-screen advertising shenanigans).

In the UK, (outside the BBC, which doesn't have adverts) TV broadcasters are limited to an overall average of 7 minutes per hour, with limits of 12 minutes for any individual clock hour (which drops to 8 minutes during primetime).

The BBC's Natural History unit deliberately inserts ten minutes of "disposable" content that can be cut from the program when it is broadcast on commercial channels (e.g. the 'Yellowstone People' segments that were included at the end of episodes of 'Yellowstone' when it was broadcast on the BBC, but are dropped when it's broadcast on commercial channels).

It's more nuanced than that, those are tighter rules for ITV1, C4, C5.

The other channels, including the "freeview" offerings can have more advertising:

(Other services) 1.1.2(B) (a) The total amount of spot advertising in any one day must not exceed an average of nine minutes per hour (15 per cent) of broadcasting.

(b) This may be increased by a further three minutes per hour (5 per cent) devoted to teleshopping spots, but this additional 5 per cent must not be used for other forms of spot advertising.

This doesn't at all change your point of course, we have good tight advertising laws in the UK, including a complete ban on any product placement whatsoever. (There was talk about loosening this rule, but I haven't seen evidence that happened to any significant degree.)

There certainly is product placement in the UK - see [1]. When watching these shows you'll see an opaque 'PP' logo flash up on the screen to let you know.

[1] https://www.itvmedia.co.uk/advertising-opportunities/broadca...

Ah, I had read they were going to bring it in, I just didn't think it had happened yet, I guess it's been longer than I remember since I've watched commercial TV.

I also find it astounding that people pay $50-60/month for a cable service that is 30% adverts.

At that ratio, the cable service should be paying them.

Same thing for the mobile web. Since I pay for data usage I am more concerned about things like video pop-up ads or even little things like web devs failing to download an ad image appropriate for the size of my screen instead of the original resolution image.

Completely agree.

I think one issue is that buying a bundle of Cable/Internet only costs a little bit more than buying Internet alone. All these Cable/Internet providers have a vested interest in getting people to watch Cable, so they overcharge substantially for just buying [rather slow] Internet alone.

Comcast has a lower tier internet service that most of their sales people will not even mention.

My favorite is when they broadcast some old TV show and because the TV show itself is so cut that they can't really cut anything out, they instead speed is up to 1.1x or 1.2x. Honestly though you can only really tell by listening to the music in the show, that's what gives it away. But yea, they make it a minute or two shorter so they can fill up more space with ads

I cannot vouch for the accuracy, but there's this:

http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/commerciallength.htm

I wonder if the marginal value of a TV ad impression declines as the number of ads per hour goes up.

So, instead of 5 extra minutes of ads, you get 5 extra minutes of bad content. Is that a win?

This is why I dumped cable in 2008.

"Hour long" American TV shows are some of the shortest in the world, and are filled with redundancy as viewers "forget" where they are in the show after a stack of ads every 6-8 minutes. This degrades the quality of the programming to the point it is not worth watching.

PBS programs are 50+ minutes long, and BBC are 58-59 minutes long. The local PBS station has been showing short ads in the last 10 minute segment of the hour. That's acceptable and much better than interrupting the programming.

In the future Broadcasters will not need transmitters, and Cable TV won't exist. All programming will be delivered over the Internet. Instead of tuning to channel 10 on your TV, your TV connects to the channel 10 website and you can choose what you want to watch. If you pay extra, you can see shows without ads.

Even among my less technologically advanced friends and family there's maybe only a handful of people who still watch shows regularly on cable television. My in-laws watch TV shows but they record them and skip over the ads. Pretty much the only thing that I know of that anyone watches on cable and still sits through ads is live sports.

Watching cable networks flail around and completely fail to understand that their business model is not relevant anymore is always hilarious. Now that Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have really good original programming there's even less of an incentive to have cable.

I'd love to "flail around" while still having two billion in annual profits.

They're flailing because they're not showing growth and share holders hate that. If they show a 2% loss in subscribers or subscriber growth stagnates, that's enough for them to freak out, despite their profits.

I work for the commercial fiber part of a cable ISP and we have been growing 25%+ for dedicated commercial fiber for a few years now but the residential customer revenue is growing at a much lower rate.

But don't the cable companies own Hulu? So they have realised the change is coming, and have already adapted.

Except Hulu (at least used to, it may have changed recently) still shows ads to their premium subscribers, which is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

It changed. There's an ad-free option on Hulu now.

Hulu just started offering an ad-free option recently.

Note the asterisk, though. Apparently a few shows are contractually obligated to include ads on Hulu, even with the "commercial-free" option.

And it is glorious. I love love love it.

yep Comcast, Fox, and Disney own Hulu

A question for those who have done more thinking on this than I have:

I see cable TV going the way of the dedicated phone line - a bundled benefit you get for a very small fee on top of the primary benefit, which will be the internet connection. The overall cost of a subscription will remain roughly the same, but the cost will be allocated to the internet connection: much like mobile carriers are now basically free voice+text across the board and the cost of the plan is based solely on the data tier you want, what I see happening in the future is that both cable TV and home phone are going to be small add-ons to your $90-$120/month internet bill. In many markets there is virtually no competition present to prevent this, and in those where there is, collusion seems to be a foregone conclusion.

This seems inevitable to me given the rise in cord-cutters and, as a recent headline pointed out, the "cord-nevers". Is this what's going to happen?

I have Time Warner internet-only service in NYC and they are constantly trying to sell me cable as a $10/month addon to my $35 50mbit internet package. I imagine it's a pretty limited set of channels, but they're very much already using that sales tactic.

Right, and now you'll need a special box just to receive antenna TV over normal analog channel range which they'll rent to you for a fee (and they are notorious for providing slow boxes that take 3-5 seconds to flip to the next channel or pause for long seconds to display a menu, or need to be rebooted constantly). I had the $10 a month TV, but once I found out they were requiring the box, I just cancelled it, I was basically paying them to avoid using an antenna, but now I'll just get an antenna.

Same thing with Charter for me. They constantly try to sell me a $7/month addon that will give access to over-the-air channels through cable. I got that with a >$10 HD antenna, so I'm not sure what the value would be. (and I've barely used that...)

I've been trying to (unsuccessfully) research why OTA broadcasts of channels exist in the first place. Why do/would these networks provide their service for free? I thought transmissions were to be encrypted.

Am I missing something?

Ads.

from what i understand OTA channels are free because the public airwaves are a public utility and they are funded by the ads they sell. cable just took this model and decided to reverse the costs from the ad generators to the consumers.

My gut thought is to look at it like radio. Radio won't go away because it only has 1 channel (AM) because it is a broadcast service. No infrastructure between the signal and you. Emergency services for example. More than that though TV and radio OTA broadcasts are something that should continue, there is 0 config, you just tune into the frequency and you get the message.

In the UK we have several free OTA channels. The commercial ones are funded mainly by advertising and by being available to all they can offer potentially more eyeballs to advertisers.

They are not free, they still make money from commercials. Same as radio. In some countries, there are public broadcast channels that don't display commercials, those you pay through tax.

With cable and satellite they often put their own commercials on top of the channel's so public broadcasting channels make less money that way.

They're still ad supported, and their infrastructure costs are much smaller than cable. (Eg, no plant of copper and fibre run across cities. Just some leased tower space, etc)

So they can charge you another $8/month for a cable box! (Not kidding, that's what Cox did to me)

Comcast even offered me 100+ channels, HBO and Showtime for free for a year just to get me hooked on the boob tube.

Luckily CenturyLink installed FTTH in my complex. That was the best phone call I've ever had with Comcast :).

It is already like this now. The only way to get the fastest internet speeds with Comcast is to also have TV. The base cable TV is very cheap and you're really buying internet access.

Already very much the case. All discounts and special offers always apply only to "triple-play" packages. Want Internet only? You end up paying a premium.

I think you're right with one potential exception: sports. And it's hard for me to have a lot of visibility on that because I don't personally follow sports, but sport dedicated networks are probably one of the main reasons people go with more expensive cable packages - at least that's my feeling when I compare line ups, the main difference is always sport networks. As long as some networks manage to keep monopoly on sport broadcasting cable can remain a first citizen.

FWIW I was able to get a 50% discount for a year on AT&T U-Verse internet-only. I think they might be playing hardball now though since their retention department claims that that discount is no longer available.

a bundled benefit you get for a very small fee on top of the primary benefit, which will be the internet connection.

Its already like that with my internet provider. I couldn't even unbundle the phone (even though I don't use it). I didn't bother with the TV add-on as Netflix exceeds my TV-watching needs, but its not much above the cost of internet.

I see cable TV going the way of the dedicated phone line - a bundled benefit you get for a very small fee on top of the primary benefit

In my region, it's already cheaper to get a package with cable TV than just internet. I have friends that don't even take the cable set of of the shipping box. I assume Comcast's per subscriber cost to cable channels is lower than the ads revenue from artificially inflating subscriber numbers.

It's been this way just about forever in many places. I remember getting cable internet like this in college in the early 2000s, and it was pretty common knowledge that you always checked to see if the package with basic cable was cheaper rather than insisting on an internet-only subscription.

I'm stationed on Oahu and was extremely surprised to find Oceanic Time Warner's Internet-only packages were one of the few affordable things on the island. Not looking forward to moving back to the mainland and dealing with another cable company.

$90-120 for internet per month? that better be like 150Mbps+ up/down

When I signed up for FiOS a year ago, it was cheaper to get TV + Internet than only Internet.

I think it makes sense. Consumer attention is now more valuable than the content. There's so much content available that it's impossible for any one person to pay attention to all of it.

As a result, publishers should have to pay for the opportunity to use someone's scarce attention rather than consumers paying to get access to content.

“Consumers are being trained there are places they can go to avoid ads.”

With that kind of rhetoric no wonder they're still in denial.

Yeah, that comment also jumped out at me as well. I really cannot fathom their thought processes.

All I can say is that is good. Ads (mostly) try to sell you something you really don't need. Additionally products which advertise can be 10-35% more expensive than products which don't.

Ugh, yeah. Tell us how you really feel about consumers Time Warner.

Wait until some of you start getting the 300gb data caps Comcast is trying to force down people's throats. They are gracefully allowing me to have my old un-metered service back for 30$ more a month.

300gb hasn't been a reasonable number for years now, and with more people leaving cable, this is clearly an attempt to monetize cord cutters further. Disgusting company.

I can count on one hand the number of times my children have sat down and watched network TV. They are 4 and 7 years old. With ~15 minutes of commercials per hour, I've probably saved them from watching thousands of commercials, which I think is a good thing.

Same. They don't even really know what commercials are.

Mine only ever see it in hotel rooms on vacation. The first time they experienced it, my son got very upset because we could pause it when he had to use the bathroom. The commercials irritated my wife & I so much we just turned it off entirely.

My wife and I watch Netflix when we do watch anything (we have twin two year olds, so this is a rare luxury). For some reason or other we turned on 'regular' tv the other day and there was an NFL game on. We could not believe how many commercials there were! Also, just how insultingly unintelligent they were. I mean, who actually would want to watch these commercials!?

As a football fan, the quantity of commercials is something else. CBS is particularly bad. You'll often see a touchdown, PAT, commercial break, cut back to the kickoff with the ball in mid-air which results in a touchback (so like 5 seconds worth of "content" which is really just a ball flying through the air and a guy catching it and kneeling down) followed by another round of commercials. It's insane.

When I get particularly frustrated with it, I pause the game and go do something else for a good 15-20 minutes, then come back so I can at least fast forward through some of them.

My 6 yr old daughter cried the first time she saw a commercial and was convinced I changed the channel on her.

Mine don't understand why live TV cannot be paused or fast forwarded.

The first time they encountered a commercial, they became very frustrated as to why their show was no longer playing and they couldn't do anything about it.

I'm convinced that it will be the children of cable-cutters that will bring the cable TV monopolies down. Why would they sign up for cable TV, and pay the ridiculous fees, when they've never had need for it their entire lives?

My roommate called me recently that the TV was not working at home, because his girlfriend wanted to watch TV.

As it turned out, we never plugged the cable into the TV, we have lived in the same house for 3 years and neither of us ever watched cable TV during that time. (we do have a cable subscription because where we live you can't get cable internet without the TV and radio part attached...)

I never understood why someone would pay a ridiculous amount of money (compared to say netflix) for a cable subscription and still think it's OK to be watching to ads for 25% of the time...

It's time for cable companies to accept the truth: their technology and business model is old fashioned (a free harddisk record to "pause" TV is a solution to a problem that should not exist!).

My girlfriend and I lived in our house for two years without even hooking up the roof antenna. Eventually I bothered to do it (not trivial, long story) because my girlfriend wanted to watch football. The idea of paying for network TV with ads is hilarious.

15:38 per hour of showtime + 2 minute of re-runs in some programs. Netflix got zero, just enjoy your movie.

Looks like cable companies are still in denial phase. How about ad-free versions of their channels?

> How about ad-free versions of their channels?

Apparently that was what cable was all about at the beginning

It's hard to lure back people to an inferior product.

The ad-free historiy of cable also tells you the future of Netflix and other streaming services. Bait...and switch!

When I had Hulu Plus, it was actually worse than cable because it forced you to sit through commercials. If I recorded the show on cable, I could fast forward through them at least.

Hulu Plus recently added an option where you can pay a bit extra (like two bucks a month) to make it ad free. It makes it a way more pleasant experience.

Only on certain shows, Hulu is still owned by networks that don't "get it".

Yes, but it's a short list. At the moment. Considering that the first derivative is at least for the moment away from ads, I am cautiously optimistic. I'm hoping that once Hulu has the data on the people paying those $2/month that it will reveal that there's a statistically-significant relationship between those shows still having ads, and the $2/month customers watching less of them per capita.

(My wife recently wanted us back on Hulu for Seinfeld, and it was a big factor in our decision to go back that we could turn off the ads, except in a set of shows we don't much care about.)

My understanding of the economics is that $2/month is significantly more than they can hope to make in ads off me, so I'm hoping the money is enough to overcome any residual desire to advertise. (Once the ad addiction is broken, there's good reason to believe it'll stay broken. Nowadays it's easier to get people to just give you a buck rather than shave away pennies at a time through ads. Thirty years ago that wasn't true.)

Which will result in going back to good ol' pirating. Again.

I don't think this qualifies as true bait and switch.

> > How about ad-free versions of their channels?

>Apparently that was what cable was all about at the beginning

I wish people would stop saying this, as it was much more about difficulty in receiving OTA signals[0]. HBO is and always has been ad-free, however.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United...

Even beyond airtime, the stupid ads and logos blotting out the screen during a show is becoming inexcusable. Sometimes those things can take up a third of the screen!

And I noticed the other day that the Discovery channel logo is now animated. Its bad enough that it squats in the corner like a dog taking a shit, now your eyes are drawn to it because its moving. Fucking bastards!

I've been off cable (television as a service) for close to two years now. The space where TV exists for value, is our local programming and news. The national relevance is almost moot from a television source, considering I read online news more here and Leister Holtz on NBC. The net savings basically was 1/2 the Time Warner bill -> $105 -> $56. That's almost $2500 in the last two years. That's a refactor of savings into something like a boiler upgrade, or solar panels to portions of the house to extend the savings even further. Either way ... small bill, big savings.

As much as I dislike cable due to all the advertising, I eventually signed up because I wanted to catch some NFL games (was just doing streaming Amazon, Netflix, etc for quite a while prior, with no NFL). I initially got an HD antenna, but reception was spotty where I live and some local channels wouldn't even come in. The amount of advertising on cable is really annoying, but it is a shame that it seems somehow very difficult or impossible to actually stream a live NFL game without having a cable or satellite package of some kind. Following online 'gamecasts' that don't actually show the video of the players on the field just isn't the same.

This is frustrating because it seems the NFL and television network providers have effectively made games impossible to watch live unless you go through the 'funnel' they want you to go through to watch it. Due to this, I've felt much less freedom of choice to select from what source I choose to obtain live NFL games, in comparison to movies, TV shows, etc, which I can generally end up finding on a streaming service of some kind to buy from.

A plus that I had forgotten about, is the on-demand stuff with a cable package, which is similar to the other streaming services I'm used to (usually no ads, or maybe one at the start of streaming), except it's nice to not have to pay for a season of a show (like I might on Amazon) if the station the show is on was paid for as part of the cable package.

Netflix has sponsored all this cutting edge research on recommendation engines, and it can predict very well how much I'm going to enjoy something. Why in the world won't it just show me a list of 4 and 5 star things? Are they afraid I'll just watch those things over the course of a month then stop subscribing?

The clunkiness of their UI isn't incompetence, it's by choice, right? Or am I missing some important part of their UI that's hiding in plain sight somewhere?

I rate every single thing I watch on Netflix and I've never had their recommendations be accurate for my tastes. I have a feeling they recommend things they want you to watch, rather than things they think you'll like.

As someone who prefers movies to series, their recommendations were fantastic for their DVD plan. Their streaming selection is much more limited (I found that maybe 10% of the movies I wanted to see were available) so they have to mask it.

(I have no idea if their delivery service recommendations are still good because they decided my address was fake when I moved and cancelled my account)

The article makes a confusion between cable companies (Comcast, TWC, Charter, etc.) and TV/content networks (Time Warner, FOX, Viacom, etc.).

Here's another explanation: every year the TV audience gets older [1]. Advertisers notoriously chase the coveted 18-49 demographic. Younger viewers are increasingly not watching traditional TV.

So, you can view Time Warner's move to cut ads in prime time as simply a way of raising prices by reducing supply (inventory).

As for cable companies shoving TV packages down customers throats, well that's easy to explain. The bargaining power a cable company has with media companies is directly proportional to how many TV subscribers they have. So every Internet-only customer a cable company has marginally raises the per-customer cost of TV.

This is also why Comcast wanted to merge with Time Warner. It's simply about reducing TV costs.

This business model really has to die.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/t...

Time Warner Inc. (the company discussed in OP's article that owns HBO, CNN etc.) has been a separate company from Time Warner Cable since 2009.

TWC is the one that Comcast tried to buy (and is now trying to merge with Charter).

It's absurd that one can pay for premium cable TV, and still must be forced to listen and watch advertisements. I refuse to watch cable TV advertisements. HBO is the only network I can stand to watch now. I have the most basic cable package because my Internet came with it, and it also came with HBO. I get so annoyed by advertisements on TV.

I wonder whether netflix et al will introduce ads once cable is dead and the VoD market is saturated. After all, they too want to increase their profit at any point in time.

As long as Netflix can appease investors by attracting new membership, they won't need ads. Once membership peaks they will have to start thinking of ways to keep their QER in the black (because investors can only see one single quarter into the future). That's when we have to worry.

Second thought is the add revenue in YouTube and how Google is slowly making it impossible to view something without an intro ad to a video spot I want to watch. Sanity on product reviews, or modifications might actually drive me away from YouTube and stick to reading. I use the MVPS.org hosts file to ad-block most of the website content I review, as I pipe it into /etc/hosts and c:\%windows%\system32\drives\etc\hosts files to keep myself from the flash -> ad-virus injection methods for security reasons. However, YT is driving me crazy with 30s ad spots for like a 3 minute video and you can't walk around them no matter how you try unless you browser jack or regional change some things (right?). Anyway .... venting on Google's ad pushes myself.

Now if the DVD vendors(hopefully a dying market) could only get the picture that when I rent a movie for my kid to play in the car, I dont want to have to skip 30 minutes of ads to start what I rented...

> cable channels have actually sped up re-runs to get two minutes more of advertising per show.

Wow. It's like a reverse TiVo, fast forward through the content to show more ads.

Yep!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6i1VVikRu0

I'll be honest that a major reason I stopped watching cable. I use to freak out because of the frequency of ads. Intro to the show? Followed by an ad. I understand the length of ads but constantly interrupting the show is what upset me much more. I'd rather watch 7 minutes of ads at once then 7 1 minute ad segments.

Now I never worry about it because of Netflix. If only I could get rid of Ads for podcasts.

The REASON cable TV caught on initially decades ago was the promise of cutting out ads. There were NO ads on Cable TV initially.

And the lesson is that eventually there will be ads on Netflix too.

I actually think they will eventually.

It may be in the form of forcing you to watch preview like you are forced to with DVDs

Or they may decide to raise monthly fee by $2 a month but you won't have to pay if you elect to allow ads.

It will happen. Share holders will eventually demand it when their growth slows down.

Why anyone younger than 50 still pays for cable is a mystery to me. Once the fiber internet infrastructure across the US becomes the norm it makes more sense for all shows and services to be provided over the net even if they keep a similar nonstop 24/7 airing format. You just wouldn't be downloading while it is turned off.

So if they are showing less commercials how are they planning to lengthen programming to fill the 30/60 minute time slots? I understand new content can be altered, but re-editing old content would be most difficult.

Too little, too late.

Supply and demand -> They can charge more for less.

Too late, I'm already done with cable.

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