TV advertising has hit a wall thanks to streaming options like Netflix
qz.com
qz.com
As was the case with newspapers and magazines for hundreds of years, as well as more and more subscription-based sites today.
The advertisements defray the cost of the thing you are paying for. If they weren't there, you'd have to pay much more for it.
The advertisements defray the cost of the thing you are
paying for. If they weren't there, you'd have to pay much
more for it.
Given that cable with ads averages over $100 a month [1] while Netflix without ads charges $14 a month for the most expensive package [2] I think the purported cost savings from having ads are not in evidence.[1] http://fortune.com/2016/09/23/average-cable-tv-bill/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/5/16429126/netflix-price-ra...
In practice, media consolidation is just shafting consumers with more ads and service costs... both due to regulations that protect inefficiencies and sheer corporate greed.
Let's say an average of 30 hours of consumption per week per person. [1] In a household of 4 people, that's 120 hours per week.
"[Nielsen says the average commercial minutes per hour] was 16 minutes/8 seconds for cable network programming." [2]
Assuming 30 second commercials, that's 32 commercials per hour, or 3,840 impressions per week. Across 30 days, that comes out to be 16,457 impressions.
"$24.76 - The average cost of a thousand impressions for a 30-second commercial in broadcast prime time in 2014, down from $25.06 in 2013." [3]
$24.76 per mille * 16.457 mille views/month/household = $407. That feels unreasonably high. If the CPM were $2, it would still translate to $40/month.
[1] https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817
[2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/308248/shorte...
[3] http://adage.com/article/news/costs-ad-prices-tv-mobile-bill...
I would be really keen to see what some actual values are, and the breakdown by age group.
I've recently moved into a new place and we haven't even wired up the TV arial, and even with a Netflix subscription, it's mainly for the kids shows - and even then we heavily restrict the amount of time they can watch TV.
Consumption for my wife and I now is generally Netflix if they have a show we like, or Plex for specific shows we can't get on Netflix - even then this would top out at _maybe_ a couple of hours a week.
Time on reddit/hn is a completely different story...
ESPN, I’m looking directly at you.
But yeah, a-la-carte is always more expensive than bundles. That's true of episodes, or channels, or whatever else.
You might do this because you get the occasional sale through the grocery market (convenience) and the grocery market would probably be happy to participate if it only had to settle up when an actual sale occurred... but I think reasonable people looking at this situation could all agree that it's stupid.
Are individual episode prices high or are bundle prices low? Remember that Netflix can sell Jessica Jones Season 1 for so cheap because people who don't care about and will never watch it are paying for it.
And yet, people bitch about the price of bundles.
Your brain is used to the ads so it tunes them out, the advert makers figure out (using the metric of "how many users complain about advert frequency") how to increase them so that users don't notice. Eventually you end up with a fifteen minute advert block every ten minutes, and you're wondering how it got to that level, but you're still invested in this-one-show-that-nobody-else-has, so you put up with it -- your brain tunes it out the rest of the time so you don't really notice it unless you've had a break from TV long enough.
I think that the UK does the right thing. In legislature they mandate that you can have no more than 12 minutes of adverts per hour of television[1]. Apparently in 1980s America a similar agreement was ruled illegal[2]. Sometimes I wonder how the Americans can put up with American courts, given how obviously biased towards corporate interests they are.
[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8341764/TV-fi...
[2]: ""Many countries regulate the amount of advertising per hour, but a similar industry agreement in the U.S. was ruled illegal in the 1980s."", from: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-02-06/opinion/ct-per...
Also it was one of the main sources of home entertainment.
If you pay for premium cable channels like HBO then you're actually contributing your money to the production of advertisement-free content.
I assume cable companies are shoveling money at HBO as fast as they can manage as otherwise it'd be a wise idea for HBO to just begin offering ala carte access to their content and get oodles of free money.
Sadly the HoBOGO is only available up here if you have a cable TV subscription that offers HBO.
The value-cost ratio is absurdly better on the internet.
A lot of people have cable because they've always had cable and now there's a generation of people coming up who've never had it.
You can't cite that, The Walking Dead has story and writing problems outside of general TV viewership declines.
I really hate advertising. There's a lot of investment in human psychology, and I sometimes find myself being seduced by a piece of advertising. They really know how to push my buttons.
It's insidious. Even news articles have paid content. Paid placement for TV and movies (Netflix is not immune to this). It's everywhere, and impossible to escape.
But I think down the road a bit we'll find out how much advertising has cost us as a society in terms of lost efficiency, it's an externality just like dumping waste into a public water source except the water source is our brain's attention span.
And smoking. Lots of smoking.
I liked Netflix insofar as they challenged cable networks and studios, but ultimately it was just more TV and I finally recently gave that up too, and it's been an improvement overall.
Of course, if the actors actually take a moment to start extolling the virtues of whatever that's a different story.
More precisely, if you threw a water balloon at someone's computer in the office, does the fact that they could have moved their computer make it so that the water balloon throwing never happened?
Turns out, he thought "Roku" was DirectTV, which his grandparents have. He was sobbing about how on "Roku" shows keep stopping in the middle (ads, I assume), if you turn off the TV the show doesn't stop, and that if you don't watch a show in time, you have to wait weeks to watch it again.
Once I got everything powered up and he saw Netflix, Amazon, et all, he was just fine again.
Anecdotally, the $4 more a month I pay Hulu for an ad-free version of their streaming service is the easiest money I spend on any entertainment.
Its around 5-10x more expensive than normal online video ads right now, but 50x cheaper than normal tv ads. Plus you can actually prove someone made a purchase after seeing an ad.
This is called advanced tv or connected ctv (atv, ctv) if you're looking for more info. Streaming on a pc/mobile is called full episode player (fep) and is similar.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaldfjkrHy4
Yes, I have childish humor.
The value-add is convenience in having a single app to deal with on multiple devices, a single login to deal with, a single payment that is fairly cheap when compared to everything individually.
Apple and others are trying to do this their own way, but nobody has something exhaustive that I know of.
I’ve found silent “we’ll be right back” screens to almost be worse than ads in some ways. It’s just a weird feeling.
They show the main feed except when ad-breaks happen, at which point they cut to a studio with a host and a couple of pundits who talk about things related to/that are happening in the game.
Works pretty well. We used to get a VPN on and find a US stream to have a laugh at the absurdity of American advertising but these days the Beeb's coverage is more than fine.
The screen can just show the players milling around, or show the fans, or the announcer can give random factoids.
Funny, I came here to comment on my distaste for services, such as hbonow, that throw ads in front of paid content. They place ads for their other shows in front of the thing I’m trying to watch (at least, the web service does). I hate it and I am considering dropping my subscription as a result.
HBO not only shows me ads for unrelated content (it’s really never something I’m interested in seeing), but I have to blindly click the timeline when I skip it. If I overshoot, I have to backtrack in search of the first scene. Overshooting again puts me back in the ad. It’s more about what HBO wants me to see than it is about what I want to see.
(they had $900 million+ in ad revenue)
It'd be a fun gimmick if they could figure out a way to auction ad free broadcasts to their viewers.
The streaming app was almost rage inducing though. Seeing periodic commercials in and of itself wouldn't be that bad. But NBC seemed to have more ad slots than ads, because I kept seeing the same dumb 3 or 4 ads over and over, and many weren't even relevant. There was a Comcast ad that made no sense to show me. I'm not in a Comcast market.
Worse, you basically couldn't forward through an event since it would stop you at an "ad point" and make you watch that ad. You could then forward to the next "ad point" and have to sit through that one. And if you skipped backwards to re-watch something to earlier than the "ad point", it would show the ads again.
By contrast, CBC basically shows you 90 seconds of ads up front, then lets you watch the rest of the event including skipping around ad free.
The NBC app could have used logic like, for every X minutes of program time you watch, you have to watch Y minutes of ads. That would have been okay. But no, the NBC app was basically "we're going to force you to watch these ads" like that episode of Black Mirror.
And BTW, this was for the paid NBC networks as I had to pickup a Sony Vue account to watch anything not on the main network. For the main network, I recorded everything on my Tablo from OTA where I could skip around as much as I wanted.
It's gone. :(
There are several. HBO itself is one of them. The sports on them are fairly limited, most notably boxing, however.
People don't realize how much dead time is introduced to professional games solely for commercial breaks.
You can ignore a sponsor logo, you can't get that time back.
But seriously, cable actually did solve a lot of problems. I've never paid for a cable TV subscription, but having to manage multiple services individually is not an ideal solution, either.
It definitely will happen eventually but then a great ship-jumping will commence again.
I am paying Netflix to provide a service for me, I will stop paying Netflix if that service includes shoving an advertising pipe directly into my brain.
I personally love that Netflix doesn't have any advertisments, especially polarizing ones.
Nope.