Kids in ‘Netflix Only’ Homes Saved from 230 Hours of Commercials a Year
exstreamist.com
exstreamist.com
Also, changing would require learning something new. People genuinely find learning to have a level of discomfort so they avoid it.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/03/learning-hurts-your-...
That...doesn't jive with the limited exposure I've had to cable television. Hundreds of channels and very little good on, I suspect people waste a lot of time flipping through.
Having never owned a TV myself, I'm actually considering buying one now. The fact that shows are actually getting better, combined with how easy it is to wait for other people to be a filter, combined with no ads makes TV actually attractive to me for the first time since I was like 5.
But still zero reason to pay for cable.
Went out, bought a nice directional antenna, bought a converter box from a friend, turned it on.
5 minutes later I realized I had zero tolerance for ads shouting at me, boxed everything up, and eventually took the TV to recycling. (It also nearly put me in the hospital, big CRTs are big.)
My iPad and Netflix/iTunes are all I need. Someday maybe I'll get a 13" iPad Pro and stick it on a wall, but I doubt it.
its amazing
Trust me, having grown up in a broadcast and then cable TV household, there's a habituality to TV consumption that isn't there in streaming.
Though streaming has its own habituality in the form of bingeing.
One thing I’d kind of like on Netflix and their ilk would be a way to choose a series and say “play me a random episode“. Some shows work well that way. I don’t want to have to go choose through six seasons to find something that appeals to me, I’ll just take an episode. Surprise me.
Something more akin to changing channels like "random cartoon" or "random comedy" would remove one last obstacle in the way of converting cable subscribers.
If the platform were to offer a random choice, the fact that the resulting view was not organic would need to be tracked separately. Conversely, you'd want a better way of figuring out whether the viewer was satisfied with the content after all. These problems require nontrivial effort.
Right now, things are much easier. The viewer always makes a choice, ostensibly a conscious choice, and all views factor into aggregate numbers that correlate with show popularity.
The UI could even continue doing separate random programs, but allow the watcher to say "Keep Watching this", locking in their choice and making it a "discovered" show.
So just track it separately and don't interpret it the same way as deliberately chosen shows. I don't see the problem.
There'd be a "cable-style-menu" option to mimic the way cable / satellite menus have looked since the late 90's. Maybe 50 or so channels of similar programming running on a time schedule, where you have the option of catching the last 30 minutes of "Terminator 2 - Judgement Day" or watching from the beginning.
Its mindless, but I think that style of consumption is what a lot of people want. It to do the hard work for them.
You could do multiple channels, but I think if you really, really want to capture the "I'm watching this with the rest of the country" feeling, a single live channel would be the safest bet.
It also may have value strategically, because there are some shows that "work" more as a live show, and there are some TV series that have better cultural impact if they are released in a serialized way. For instance I suspect Game Of Thrones has been more successful at permeating culture by releasing one episode a week than it would have been had the whole season been dumped at once.
Financially though, it's not clear this would work for Netflix. Now, depending upon how they pay for a given piece of content, they're paying for a lot of programming being used as background noise. You'd have to get enough people buying Netflix subscriptions because of this added option to offset the higher costs.
I work in the streaming industry, and offering the same "background noise" quality is something that still eludes us. I personally believe that as soon as you introduce any sort of possibility of explicit input from the user (skip, pause), or even implicit (by the way, all of this is also available on demand in our catalogue) the experience is tainted. Subconsciously we know that we are needlessly watching something we should be tailoring ourselves.
The power of the linear channels is that they are so severely limited. Streaming services has long tauted that they are superior because they aren't. Tough problem.
Also, kids are consuming a lot of highly effective YouTube ads.
You can also runs pixelserv that will return a 1 pixel image so you don't get any errors.
It does on FF for Android!
If you want a more "native" player there's always SkyTube and other similar apps for longform content.
There's a few apps for which I think native is important, but I'm generally happy with mobile websites. uBlock Origin really makes mobile web not suck.
But it turns out YouTube was the last source of dynamic (i.e., not image/text) ads in my life, and now when on the rare occasion that I accidentally open YouTube in my work Chrome profile, I'm surprised at how averse I've become to dealing with even the tiny load lag + few-second wait for a pre-roll. I've considered switching to Spotify, since Google Play Music seems to be one of those life-support products that PMs within Google make their promotions off of through useless UI churn instead of fixing longstanding issues, but at this point, YT Red is what stops me from doing so.
I can get straight unlimited 1GB connection Internet for $99 month. I pay another $45 for the cable. It's difficult to get BBC and BBC America without cable or satellite, and I watch both all the time.
Except for product placement, and I suppose billboards, I just don’t see ads anymore. I don’t hear them in my music, they only exist as product placement in my television and movies, I don’t see them online. I’ll take that reduction any day, and just accept the total elimination is unlikely.
The last (and final) one I watched (just to see how bad it was) had a 30 second (I am not shitting you) beer commercial complete with the signature Michael Bay 360 degree shot.
And not to mention the Chinese - "we must call central government" - pandering.
https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/best-netflix-...
Smarter people stop watching TV > TV adapts to the new demographics to fight over dwindling ratings > TV becomes dumber > Even more smarter people stop watching TV
I had the same reaction this Thanksgiving when I was at my Dad's. I don't think it actually has become dumber, we're just not used to it anymore. I felt like I was watching commercials with a bit of content sprinkled in. I cut the cord about six years ago.
It started with station logo water marks and now its amazing to see how much of the lower right hand corner of the screen is seen by networks as acceptable to use for advertising another show while the current show or sporting event is running.
When I look at the crap I watched as a kid in the 80s (which included a good amount of 70s reruns), basically all broadcast TV today is far superior. But the competition for broadcast TV isn't "no competition" now, it's the Internet, and computer games, and Netflix. The entertainment industry has been blown wide open by the Internet and computers, and so now they have to compete with thousands of alternatives instead of just having 3 channels to choose from. Naturally, quality goes up.
When I was a kid, the "rots your brain" videogame that my parents would only let me play at friends' houses was Super Mario Brothers. Now, my "rots your brain" pastime is Factorio, which is a game where people are literally designing chips in:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/2vqzlx/8_bit_alu_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/4aijlw/here_is_my...
SpaceChem even more so.
As others have mentioned, Zachlikes are basically programming, and in particular the debugging / pipeline optimization parts can quickly drain my enthusiasm if I've been doing a lot of hard coding at work.
Actually, I can test this...I've got some old My Little Pony episodes lying around on a hard disk. They're 9 minutes apiece. IIRC they ran 2 to a timeslot, so that's 18 minutes of show per 30 minute timeslot, and 12 minutes of commercials.
When I was in High School, our English teacher actually wrote and produced a TV show and was telling us about her experience and some of the things she had to do to cut episodes in the right amount of time for commercials. At the time (mid 2000s), the average was 23 minutes of show per 30 minute episode.
Looking across my library at recent shows, it seems to average about 21 minutes nowadays.
I don't complain about the speeding too much as I watch most shows are 1.5x and cut out the commercials so a show with 18 minutes of content takes 12 minutes.
(I'm sorry.)
It doesn't work this way for content that tries to communicate a specific mood, but for slapstick humor chains like BBT, more jokes is just funnier than less jokes per minute.
Try searching for versions with laugh track removed to get a better sense of the writing per se without the extra emotional manipulation.
Compare with Silicon Valley, a comedy show which also mercilessly skewers nerds, but more for the sake of social commentary than just piling on insults, and which treats even the most caricatured characters with some dignity and humanity.
I think "dumb show" reflects more about the style of humor than the type of people who like it. Some people prefer clever, subtle humor. Some people want goofy and slapstick humor. Some people love awkward situational humor. There is no account for taste.
But yeah, it's an awful show.
I don't think that's quite what the parent was saying. It's not that BBT is a show for a dumb audience. Rather, BBT is a show about supposedly smart characters, with a writing staff that doesn't have anyone sufficiently-smart-enough on it to be able to accurately depict the thinking process of genuinely smart characters.
You can't, as someone with an average IQ, really write the internal monologue of someone with a much higher IQ. You can probably capture their personality, but you can't solve problems the way they solve problems (or write characters who do so) without, at least temporarily, actually being that smart.
This is an often-discussed aspect of writing military fiction: it's basically impossible to come up with the sort of strategic masterstrokes that a famous general would come up with, without yourself being a famous general. You can bring together ten lesser strategists and ask them to knock their heads together, and you still won't get a brilliancy† out.
† https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-play-a-brilliancy
Most people who write master strategists in fiction end up just doing one of a few main things:
• they crib all the "clever moves" from well-known historical battles. This limits you to just, essentially, writing history over again wearing a new coat.
• they get an actual master-ish strategist to consult. You see this in, for example, sports anime about chess or Go—the author usually relied on input from a high-level professional (but not master) player.
• they just make the characters' abilities entirely informed, rather than explicit. This is your Sherlock Holmes story: you can see what they came up with in the end, but you don't get any insight into how they went about putting it together. The author just decided what the solution was, worked backward to what sorts of clues would lead one to that solution, and then decided by fiat that the protagonist would notice those clues.
The whole "rational fiction" movement is basically about avoiding doing any of the above.
BBT as a minstrel show -- which is a way of mocking another group -- is an apt simile, regardless of whether blacks suffered worse fate or not.
Which is not even relevant anyway: what blacks suffered had little to do with minstrel shows, those were the least of their troubles. If parent had compared BBT to slavery, you'd have a point. But he made a much more precise argument.
Do we have to go through this every time BBT is mentioned on the internet. We all know the show sucks and why, and adding this descriptor only starts the same stupid fight that appears on every BBT thread and is never resolved and just makes everyone angry.
I still haven't forgiven Parker & Stone for telling people that voting didn't matter. If they've grown up, with some kind of mea culpa, I'll be happy to welcome them back to civil society.
Anyone have an anecdote of young BBT fans being drawn to physics or math?
Sure, it's a comedy, but it's not like there's a watchable Star Trek turning a new generation towards STEM. Mr. Robot, probably just breeding more anarchists.
But yes the live audience laughs moronically on cue and I totally agree with your assessment of the show.
I get my episodes of BBT from iTunes. You’re correct that BBT episodes are shorter than most other mainstream shows (at least in my own library). They are often only about 18-19m, other episodes reach 21-22m as well. I don’t see any below 18m in the past four seasons and stopped searching beyond that. Alternatively, most of the half-hour shows I watch are consistently about 20-21m, so BBT is definitely providing less content overall.
As for the assertion of 1m intros with BBT, that's 3x longer than reality. I scripted simple controls for controlling iTunes via my phone so that I wouldn’t need to reach for my kbd or trackpad. I set the FWD time to 30 seconds and the BACK time to 10 seconds. Jumping ahead by 30s is appropriate for most shows that I watch, whereas BBT requires me to also jump back by 10s (it has a 20s intro).
Few sitcoms still have 1m or longer intros. New Girl is about 5s, down from around 30s when it started. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia dropped from 1m to 30s. The Sarah Silverman Program dropped from 22s to 17s in 2010. I see the overall trend for typical broadcasts as gradually reducing intros (excluding shows on HBO, etc; those still have very long intros but also no commercials).
Supernatural or Lost are good examples of how an intro should be. Literally just the name of the show on the screen for a few seconds, no theme music that gets annoying halfway through the season, no montage of the characters tromping around a fountain, just skip to the show.
At any rate... the Netflix skipped intro is how it should be done. Thank god for Netflix.
That's been the trend for dramas basically ever since-- Lost was among the first to adopt the minimal intro that's popular now. Stargate even made a joke out of it in one of their later episodes.
IIRC the standard is:
22 minutes for 30 min shows
44 minutes for hour long shows
You can go to RARBG and check the MediaInfo for any show.
So you get 16 min of ads every hour. So a quarter of each hour is ads.
I stopped watching normal TV 2 years ago and before that used to record all my shows so I could fast forward through the adverts. Stuck at the in-laws for Christmas and I actually can't watch their TV due to the adverts now.
I’m now a functioning adult and find it hard to get into video games, not because I fear I’ll get addicted but I just don’t get the same dopamine hit from games like I used to. I drive on race tracks to get that hit now.
In February of this year Minecraft apparently had 55 million players (with 122 million copies sold).[1]
1: http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/02/27/minecraft-has-55-mill...
I have feeling the bottom of the barrel has gotten a lot worse than it used to be.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmH4bXt23LHAg-INoizVY...
Depends. Talk shows in the 70s (Dick Cavett and such) were far better than the BS today (from Fallon and Kimmel to Letterman). M.A.S.H would stand up there with anything today. And the original talent on something like the Ed Sullivan show or the Soul Train or Johny Cash show. Or the Groucho Marx game show I've been watching on YouTube (all the above were beyond my time, and I've only caught MASH on re-runs).
I have a feeling that MASH somehow breaks the normal chain of time and causality in that the only time anyone ever caught it was on re-runs. Same with "A Charlie Brown Christmas". These are shows that were born in the big bang and civilisations occasionally drift into their broadcast space for a few decades before moving on. We're still in the MASH nebula, and have been since 1972.
I haven't had a TV in 10 years and when I'm at someones house who does, the difference is immediately apparent, especially during the late night segments.
The average early AM commercial now (at least in my area) is literally so bad that it feels like advertisers just assume that their average viewer is mentally challenged or emotionally unstable in some way. It's almost like watching a SNL skit or a fake commercial within a really bad B-grade movie.
With YouTube we see people not relying on direct ad revenue, but rather embedding sponsors into their content. And doing things like recommending products and using Amazon referrals to generate revenue from their channels. I guess the problem with broadcast TV is that commercials still work just as well as they did, they just have a smaller audience.
Is Factorio popular among kids?
I was shocked that network tv could produce something so smart, balanced, thoughtful, albeit 20 years ago.
Wait, I'm sure there have been more. Right?
Yeah, never mind.
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-101-teaser-a...
Product Placement is like a landmine, I'm watching the show when they spring an ad out of the blue and kill any semblance of suspension of disbelief.
There's a certain feeling of "Gotcha! I still got it. Can't full me, Diet Coke".
Also good shows and movies do not do this. Never once noticed product placement in The Wire or Breaking Bad, Pontiac Aztec notwithstanding.
Details: https://www.polygon.com/2015/3/13/8210581/monument-valley-ho...
i.e : Gypsy first episode was filled with Channel perfume branding. NO -f'ing- GO
there are over 7,000,000,000 people in the world
100 channels is not even close to enough, especially when they're all funneled through the same 2 or 3 providers
It's scary and interesting.
This is no different from YouTube or Facebook. Except those services follow your personally and make shadow profiles of your preferences and sell them to other companies. Is that really better?
If you mean the ads are better quality, then that’s even worse. Better ads mean you’re being told what to buy... more effectively.
I suppose it depends what you mean by "better quality".
I have seen ads which were effective in making me think something was a good product only to discover that it's not upon further research.
On the other hand, I have seen ads which were really good in the sense that they showed me something that I would not have otherwise found and that I genuinely like.
If it matters to anyone I work for Google (Cloud) so maybe I'm biased in my stance on ads. That being said, I am guilty of using ublock origin so I like to think I hate annoying ads as much as anyone else.
1950s: 13% Pre-cable: 18% Pre-web: 22% Pre-Youtube: 24% Now: 30%
As alternative forms of media have become available, the value per viewer hour has decreased, so the total amount of time devoted to commercials has increased.
With Netflix, you pay for an all you can eat sub without commercials. Newssites and newspapers should do the same. It allows for two viable ways to pay for content: either paying directly, or paying via advertisement/your time.
The old model of e.g. cable TV is akin to having one's cake and eat it too. Its outdated, and superseded. The only reason it still exists is because the legacy is being used due to habit ie. people who don't know yet about on-demand services like Netflix. Probably tons of babyboomers + elder. If we want to put the nails in the coffin, we gotta 1) unsub to cable TV as much as we can 2) not use it as much as we can 3) stimulate and help these lagging groups to get on with the program.
Note that I don't mind smart or funny commercials. I will actually seek out reruns of the old "Hi I'm a Mac/PC" and watch them with delight. (And I'm a PC user :o).
When all you have is TV, though, you can acclimate yourself to all kinds of rubbish. I'm sure in the future when we have a superior protocol or way or doing something, we'll look back and wonder why we thought X was ever a good idea.
The mother then informed that it's always been this way, so I looked up a few old ad compilations from the 90's and early 2000's. She was right.
I'm not sure about the television programming itself-- drama, "real-life" shows have always been a hit. I remember when I did watch television, I did so hoping to numb out whatever responsibility I had to do at the time with something non-thinking enough to be calming, but dramatic enough that it wouldn't bore me. The result is the crap they've been airing for years. And I realized again that advertising is all about subconscious influence. Doesn't matter how fucking stupid the commercials are, it matters that you've seen it. Television is mindless in the way that it lulls you-- you'll soon forget what happened, because nothing much happened, and you weren't really paying attention because the programs don't allow you to process everything consciously (in fact, that's because there's nothing to process-- afterall, all of it is laid out to you clear as day. This is what happens next, susie does this for this reason, the resolution you are about to see is expected under the paradigm we've constructed, etc). If you watch the same rehashed concepts everyday, the same commercials, it will stick in the subconscious, and some time later you'll be shopping in the supermarket and pick up a pack of Charmin toilet paper for no goddamn reason even though they market their flushable rainforest corpses with bears who complain that the paper is sticking to their assholes. You make that decision to buy in a split second because you hate grocery shopping and you don't have a lot of time to debate over prices because you still have a dozen other items to pick up. How do you choose? Those bears are cute, something tells me this toilet paper is extra soft and clearly that's something I should want out of a decent quality toilet paper... idk throw it in the cart.
To me, it feels like it's an effort to subvert the always-listening/always-watching tracking. If Google has now searched for some random thing being sold because of that ad, then those ads will be shown to me when I browse on my computer (since it's all part of the same profile).
It's intrusive, obnoxious, and I feel zero remorse doing anything to avoid ads (such as use an ad blocker).
What? Seriously? Commercials try to hijack your devices? Isn't this fairly clear-cut unauthorized access of a computer system, and therefore criminal?
> If Google has now searched for some random thing being sold because of that ad, then those ads will be shown to me when I browse on my computer
This isn’t unheard of. Burger King pulled that stunt to great success: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/business/burger-king-tv-a...
97% of American Households own a television.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/media/03televisi...
Then right behind them the "I don't subscribe to cable crowd and I don't understand why people do"
75% of households still have cable or satellite.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/24/a-stunning-number-of-ameri...
And I'm one of the 25% that don't subscribe to cable but I refuse to call myself a "cord cutter" because my entertainment still comes across a cord - it's just not coax.
You're still watching content on your television, over a wire, brought to you by the major content providers. What's the difference again?
I also subscribe to Netflix, commercial free Hulu, and commercial free CBS. But how I get my content isn't in a practical sense any different than a cable subscriber except for a lack of ads and I don't have to pay all of the extra fees.
I'm also not bothered about admitting I have 6 TVs throughout my house all with Rokus.
No Schedule: I watch what I'd like to when I'd like to. I never care what's 'on TV' or when something is scheduled. I watch things when I'm in the mood to and have the time to. The idea of specific weeknight lineups or specific programs bringing an audience to another seems silly and quaint.
No Access to Cable-Only Programming: I have no access to cable-only programming. If you lock your content down to your cable TV channel and your app that requires me to login with my cable account, I can't see it. And, no, I'm not going to pay $50 a month to get cable to see your TV show.
A majority of the time, if I'm sitting on the couch, I'm playing a game, watching YouTube, or watching a movie. So, yes, there's a pretty big difference between a typical TV watcher and a cord cutter in terms of advertiser reach, access to content, dollars spent, and schedule. As more folks take this approach, more of the industry has to adjust to keep pace.
I'm in no way saying cable is better, the only reason I had was because we were forced to pay $99 a month for Comcast cable + tv when I was renting.
I would never do cable now. The 6 TVs I have around the house would cost $50 a month just in box rental fees and that doesn't include the HD technology, cost recovery, network access, and sports access fees.
If I were staying on campus in a dorm room today, I probably wouldn't bother with a TV. I would have my laptop, phone, and/or tablet.
But the larger question is "having a television" just semantics? My family was staying in an extended stay for awhile when we were having our house built. I had an external monitor I was using for work with my laptop. When I wasn't using it, my son was using it with his game console and to watch Hulu, Netflix, etc.
What's the practical difference between "not having a tv" and having a computer monitor used to watch video?
[0] https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2017/12/12/16766332/nin...
The one good thing with ads on the web is that it works as a micropayment.
I wonder how a service like Youtube would work without ads ?
I currently have a no-ads subscription on Youtube (packaged with a google music, so it is pretty attractive to me) but I don't think this service would work as a gated subscribe only website.
0. Consent required for any ads at all, from user and (see 2) publisher if involved.
1. User private ads, anonymously confirmed (ANONIZE2 ZKP protocol, will move on-chain when Ethereum supports it). Ad placement is signal- and cookie-free, by a machine learning agent running only on device and looking at only your on-device data (private sync uses secret key, no data in clear on any servers), matching against common per region/language ad catalog listing edge urls + keywords per ad.
2. Revenue share of 70% to inventory (ad slot) owner, i.e., to the user in (1). If publishers partner on indirect ad slots p, pub gets 70%, user gets 15%. In all cases users gets at least as much as Brave gets.
So users of Brave block ads and trackers by default. If you want to contribute anonymously you can fund your user BAT wallet (we are doing initial grants). Pinned a la Patreon contributions as well as private pro data by view count and time send tokens in one transaction on chain per 30 days of uptime.
But when BAT ads are up and sharing revenue to users, the you can opt into those to fill your wallet. If you want to can out, you will be able to, but only via KYC (banking “Know Your Customer) level vetting. By default your revenue will flow back to your pinned and supported sites and creators.
"Really can't disagree with you there, kid."
We got YouTube Red because of the ads on iPad were out of control. It's insane the amount of commercials YouTube puts in a 10 minute clip of Busy Beavers, etc.
https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/4257/have-there-be...
Those are just the most obvious product placements, recognizable to folks who can't read all the little japanese labels on things that appear in the background.
There are also shows which are nothing but vehicles for products.
Of course this isn't just a Western phenomenon, the video game/anime/movie/card game/merchandise extravaganza that is and always was Pokemon being probably the best single example.
When it's released, sure, okay, so you do your product placement and get some extra cash to finance the series. Fine. But now, your series which hopefully is good enough to still be watched 20 years, 30 years from now has characters randomly bringing up how they drive an Audi and did you see that builtin navigation system or some bullshit like that.
Some TV series are works of art. Thankfully, those tend to not have product placements because they have a high budget to begin with. But sometimes, PP works itself into "classics" and that's when it's really upsetting.
What the poster said is pretty much true all around for anything in the most commercial space of music. "Country" music for instance has some pretty blatant product placement, too... but again, largely only at the most commercial space only (the radio-friendly arena-rockish style). Jason Aldean for instance got an endorsement from Coors, and actually changed a song lyric in one single from "Shiner Bock" to "Rocky Tops" as a result. (https://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/1084513...). The same applies for the club friendly / arena side of electronic dance music. A large percentage of them will include product placements, particularly for club lifestyle type products and/or liquors of some sort.
Overall, product brand "name drops" have increased heavily in the lyrics of top pop music over the last 20 years (http://www.meiea.org/resources/Journal/Vol.14/Gloor-MEIEA_Jo... page. 48).
I personally find this type of product placement annoying, and prefer other strategies where companies gain presence without intruding into the music too much. (Red Bull IMHO is an example here: their focus tends to be on content marketing strategies, a strategy that has worked out well for them, and at least in music I find much less annoying).
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jun/22/new-technology...
... for some definition of better.
Then again it sticks out like a sore thumb to me when shows you IP addresses that can't be valid....
It's when they take the time to show off their completely irrelevant windows tablet or car navigation system or worse. When it's blatant.
If the protagonist is going to use a laptop computer anyways, I don't care if Apple or DELL paid them so it's going to be one of theirs.
Edit: read further down and I have to say that I've never seen (or noticed) anything so blatant as characters going on about features of a car. That would indeed be frustrating.
That's a false equivalence and a poor way to think about things.
People making those real-life product placements are not deliberately placing those products in view of others in exchange for money for the sole purpose of manipulating viewers to buy said product. I agree with the GP. At least with ads you know that you're being manipulated.
But if you are less lucky it would be completely disruptive to the world the show or movie is trying to create. For example, in the show love, the silverlake hipsters that the show took such long pains to describe would have never touched mcdonalds. Yet in the show they go around saying how great it is.
And then some shows really get the product placement right:
When Captain Kirk answers his Nokia phone while drinking his Budweiser, that's when I hate it.
I remember that we could receive government funded Austrian ORF 1 in Germany. They usually showed the same movie as other German commercial TV stations at the same time but without ads. Saving around 1 hour per movie.
"Bbc" (watching "do they know" at the moment) "Amazon" "Netflix"
We went to the cinema to watch Paddington last month. They had barely any idea what the adverts before the film were.
Yet rarely watch dvds. I've noticed Amazon has adverts on their fire tv stick on some shows though, but we use the built in lg tv app which doesn't.
On a serious note, I'm not sure how you managed to pull this off as a parent. Two weeks ago I saw a young child of Asian tourist parents in the streets of Manhattan, standing in front of a major chain drugstore and excitedly flagging down the parents to bring attention to a prominently displayed colorful plastic dump truck placed in the window display, precisely at baby level.
I want to figure out how to keep my future kids from doing that.
The times we live in...
I got introduced to it by way of Palladium's adoption of the world/setting as an RPG, who expanded the world with a whole bunch of amazing sourcebooks that never went anywhere near the silliness of the later incarnations involving "COWABUNGA DUDE!".
Source: grew up with both Bionicles and the multicolored bricks. Bionicles sat put together on a shelf while I reconfigured the bricks every day.
So, my hypothesis is that exposure to ads does not have any benefits. I would not extend this hypothesis to product placement, however.
I suppose it's a good thing to teach. How else are kids supposed to know? How do kids who grew up with broadcast and cable ads learn to tell them apart?
We went to grandmas house and once the commercials started he said:
"Daddy take this out.. This take out"
And I was kind surprise. He did not have the concept of Commercials and hate it.
Now I think about myself, having to wait commercials and be woke up at certain time to watch my favorite cartoons.
Love it, I only wish it was possible to have a password on Netflix Profiles.
Hey cable subscribers...go ahead and channel surf and take some stats on how often a commercial is playing as you iterate through each channel.
It’s ridiculous. Netflix is alright with me.
(don't get me wrong—Netflix is great, too. And also torrents. Not even thinking about ads is better than fast forwarding through them).
These days we use an Apple TV 4th Gen, with only Netflix, Plex and KPBS apps, and I believe my kids are better off for it. They still have access to way too much TV, but at least we know what they're seeing.
Actually, the entire Internet kinda presents the same problem for adults and personal willpower.
Personally, of course I want less commercials. But being able to consume more per minute isn't necessarily a good thing, IMO.
Yes it's passive, but it's still better than brainwashing then to buy McDonald's
Another huge advantage of not having actual TV in house is that we need to watch everything on PC or tablet. This adds friction in the process compared to just taking remote and press button. Also small kids typically will need parents help to watch anything instead of just starting to flip channels by themselves and exposing themselves to all commercial nastiness in very early age.
Finally, once everything you want to watch is on demand, you have very different mindset. You never rush for specific time to watch TV. Time after dinner can be some activity. There is no compulsion that you must be first to watch GoT right along your friends. All that silly competition dies out. Now a days we watch many movies and TV series many years after they have been released and we absolutely don't feel as if we missed out by not watching right when they came out. Entertainment exists for us instead of other way around.
I pity parents who still haven't figured this out and have actual TV sets in their houses.
"Why can't we watch it again?"
"Pause this while I go to the bathroom."
"Hey, look, is that a toy?"
"Dad, why do people put up with commercials?"
And now that they're teenagers: "Dad, did you remember to record that show that I forgot the name of and didn't remind you to set the recording?"
I guess some things don't change.
Which do you think is more likely?
I wouldn't be surprised if it evolves again. You already see podcasts going from sponsored live-reads to injecting ads per-download. For better or worse, this allows lower-volume (local and more targeted?) ads instead of large companies who are one of a handful of sponsors for the whole show.
That’s unusual. And it just reminds me of how different other people’s lives could be. When I grew up, no one in the family liked watching television. I still remember buying DVDs and watching those, but just not regular television programming.
I think it would be more helpful to have a min max and mode than a mean.
Those Netflix only homes should at least get PBS.
I actually grew up watching PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
I would expect the Ten to have far more in depth and gruesome stories than newsround. 10 year olds don't need to know the minutiae of human trafficking.
Firefox for Android can block ads... But yes, it's much harder with tablets and phones..
It had a couple glitches at first, but has been working very well.
The trick is to arrive near the start of the trailers - they are adverts, but personally I think they add to the cinema experience, as does overpriced popcorn. The adverts though should be destroyed - just add 50p to the ticket, it's not going to change anyone's decision of whether to go or not.
It saves adults too.
Sure, an adult might switch channels during a commercial but your time is still wasted because now you're filling the gap with random surfing rather than consuming the content you're interested in.
It honestly surprises me at how cable providers managed to exist for so long without getting a backlash from its customers.
A 1 hour show on American TV typically only has 42 minutes of actual content. The other 18 minutes are filled with commercials.
You are losing 30% of that 1 hour off your life, not only that but you're paying a premium to receive it. After removing special promo prices even basic cable from most major providers is a lot more expensive than streaming services.
I much rather have one service I pay to resulting in many content providers allowing me to consume ad-free content.
Finally he found Disney Junior, and then the whole ad thing started. He was so frustrated with all the ad breaks, he switched off the TV. Enough said.
Cancer pays.
People like money.
People are selfish.
They will opt for seeking for payment from cancer when given the option.
looking at you google
When I'm watching casual TV (not a serious drama or a movie) I don't mind the interruption. Gives me a chance to think about something else, check my phone, talk to someone, or walk away.
My kids have a genuine aversion to commercials. With Netflix and YouTube, they can watch content they choose without the constant interruption and"garbage time" of TV.
I don't even own a tv. When i visit my parents and watch tv, quite frankly, it's 95% trash + 5% stuff i have already seen on the Internet (but badly translated in my native language).
One negative aspect of netflix is that my kids just endlessly scroll through show after show, but doesn't actually watch it. And when they do, they rarely finish it (meaning really enjoy or get into the show). It's like when you don't really enjoy food when you have too much of it easily accessible.
So this new year, I'm even cutting netflix streaming service. Will see how that goes.
This six year old child is making millions of dollars: http://wgntv.com/2017/12/11/this-6-year-old-is-making-millio...
A TV tuner that just replaces commercials with a placeholder image and a countdown to when the break is over would make broadcast TV just about tolerable for me. (time-shift, and skipping past commercials is a better solution, but there's some things you want to see live)
Then they could take over, and make parents much happier.
Maybe even happy enough to pay an extra $1.99 a month for trustworthy content curation?
My 2yro just sat through the Nutcracker the other week. He sits and listens to about half an hour of Dune each night. (We're just about to finish Dune Messiah.) Sure I don't know how much he comprehends, but he's not fidgeting or trying to find toys to play with.
He will also sit and build with Duplo-style bricks or wooden trains for hours, and with those there is a visible engagement metrics.
(And yes, he does have his moments, and times where he does like to go from thing to thing, but it's not constant just like the long spans of attention aren't constant.)
I know it's n=1, but I don't believe that kids have an inherit and maximal 3-5 minute attention span.
I need to tell my wife to record them on the VDR.
This is a very sad statistic. I cannot imagine what this non-stop television consumption is doing to their brains. I am guessing this does not include the tablet screen time which is another 3 hours per day or so.
In case anyone else does not know.
It's been great!
>> Mental Health General's Statutory Warning <<<
>> Binge watching is injurious to kids health <<<
Having said that my kids do get a couple hours on the weekend and it's actually fascinating to see what happens when they put the iPad away. It's almost like they need a half hour or so to re-adjust to real life after all the stupid content they just watched.
Then they go outside and do what kids do best - be kids.
(note: I also limit screen time for my kids)
Even complex shows like Game of Thrones can be stimulating simply because of the complexity, even if it's nothing more than made-up stories. And stuff like Blue Planet or Black Mirror are genuinely thought-provoking.
It's hard(er) to develop useful skills from TV watching; the only thing I can think of is maybe learning about filmmaking, and that's only if you're watching to learn rather than watching passively.
I read mostly fiction as a kid and owe most of my career to my reading and writing skills.
Not gonna lie, it isolates you from mainstream society a bit. Whether that is good or bad is debatable.
What if this is not a replacement of advertisement as much as it is a more thoroughly integrated form of it?
I mean, which would you rather be: The guy who pays for a blatant ad that is segregated from the content, or the guy with a slick PR rep who gets your product glowingly mentioned inside the content?
I watch TV sitting with a laptop. I mute during the commercials and look at whatever for 2-3 minutes and return to watching. Done this for decades.
I will likely go straight Internet connection in 2018 once I figure out how to get BBC and BBC America.
Many people may not have thought of a Hyundai as a rough-and-tumble kind of car, but seeing it in such a setting normalizes that association ever so subtly, not unlike why repetition is an effective strategy to commit something to memory.