Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981) | Hacker News Reader

Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

nytimes.com

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Q: Will X be invaded by ads?

A: Almost definitely.

Even some major automakers seem to assume that the car of the future will include ads.[0] Amazing that car companies could’ve survived all these decades without them!

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15947784/audi-25th-hour-a...

Pretty much the entire history of broadcast TV is driven by the auto industry release/advertising schedule, so they’ve been pretty involved in ads for a while now, just not inside the vehicles. It’s merely the final frontier for them.

I thought I’d seen it all until gas pumps started having loud auto-playing videos. I consider it one of the benefits of an electric car that I no longer see gas pump ads.

And this stuff always seems to hit “lowest common denominator” quickly. Once consumer-hostile methods prove some kind of worth, everyone seems to follow suit to compete (or just be as greedy).

I actually don't mind videos playing at the pump. There really isn't anything else do to.

I’d rather be alone with my thoughts. Most TV has negative value for me.

Same. I know it’s a bad cognitive habit to let it get to me, but the asinine content on those “PumpTV” feeds just makes me angry. I’ve never once learned anything new from it, so I mute the speaker with my wallet while imagining it’s playing the voiceover from the PumpTV Superego sketch [1]:

“You’re watching PumpTV... fuck you!”

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CmwrphX9kE

I haven't actually been to a gas station in several years, but the ubiquitous TVs in places like waiting rooms and airports drive me batty.

I wouldn't even mind if the content was good, but it's always some nonsense like Four Morons Feign Knowledge of Foreign Policy or Young Couple Pretends to Choose a House.

Agreed. I'm perfectly fine just sitting for a few moments. Barring that, there are also usually magazines, which are hard to read when the TV is blaring at you. And if I have to wait more than a few minutes, I have a phone I can look at. Under no circumstances does a TV make things better.

Just another thing to ignore.

For those still subjected to these who don’t know: Most video-enabled pumps in the US can be muted by pressing the second button from the top on the column of four buttons to the right of the display.

I consider it a small quality of life improvement to not hear the same Seth Meyers joke two or three times while fueling.

I try this every single time and it’s never worked.

I've never visited a gas station with ads more than once.

In my area you'd run out of gas stations quickly with this strategy :-)

I just silence the speaker by pressing my wallet against it while I’m pumping gas.

I tried this and it stopped the pump and required me to get the cashier to re-enable it. I had to pump the rest of my gas in a second transaction.

Wow, that’s a really interesting result I haven’t heard! Do you recall at what brand you experienced this? I generally visit Shell and Chevron stations across CA but I’d make an exception to attempt to repro that.

I've always pressed the right side buttons, from bottom to top. This works for me, US as well.

I tried this morning at a Citgo and it worked. Thanks Dan!

Yeah, I discovered a pump display that actually had a labelled "Mute" button, and I figured out that some other ones can be muted by poking at the buttons.

Barring that, I usually end up walking a little away from the car in order to try not to be advertised at.

There are many online businesses that sell a product and make more off display ads next to those products. Marketing is crazy and the arbitrage from affiliates is the search for the price of your attention and conversion.

I guess it makes sense considering how tiny the margins in fuel retailing are.

It seems a bit more like wherever ads can be stuffed, they will be, because they are viewed as a consequence-free additional revenue stream. Once gas pumps had LCDs instead of eight segment displays, it was only a matter of time before someone realized "hey this thing could play ads!"

It's more free of consequences in a very low margin business though - if they drive a couple of customers away with the ads, they were only making a few pennies from them anyway.

In a higher margin business, the cost of losing customers is higher so the ad revenue would have to be very high to offset that, so you're less likely to see intrusive advertising.

Even worse, those early systems had mute buttons and those mute buttons got such use they they're obviously worn our or broken through use. So new gas pump AV, no mute button. Last time I pumped gas I stood their with my hand over the speaker to muffle the damn thing.

cars are not entirely without ads for a few decades already: taxis in the US must show ads if they want to have the credit card terminal. visa keeps all of the ad revenue.

An interesting exception to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

My favorite is when I have to watch an ad before watching an ad.

Every so often I'll come across a funny ad that I want to rewatch it on Youtube. More often than not I find myself having to sit through another ad (sometimes even a competitor's) to watch the initial ad.

Why wait for self-driving cars... my startup VUGO is already doing this in rideshare vehicles. Before you all start a revolution, we are focused on improving the passenger entertainment experience and working on the big problem of making short trips free at the intercept of lower cost per mile/seat and our increasing alternative revenue.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3068575/will-ride-hail-be-free-b...

My gym has guideless basic cable on the cardio machines. Anytime I channel surf I would estimate more than 50% of the 70ish channels are running commercials. Same when i stay at a hotel with cable. I’m surprised anyone is still willing pay for this.

Thankfully the new machines at my gym have Netflix.

Do you have to have your own netflix to use that or does it use the gym's login?

When I heard Netflix was cracking down on household accounts, I didn't realize they were going to go this far into the weeds ;)

You use your own, you have the option to make an account with precor and tie the streaming services to it so they work on whatever machine you grab.

You really have a TV on each machine at your gym? This is peak America

It is common in pretty much any developed country.

Probably small, couple inches?

Normally I'm there with you, we stuff way too many TV's everywhere as some kind of sign of success & progress. But in the case of the dreadmill, I can understand. Nobody has figured out how to make those livable.

Pretty common. The vendors (Precor, Life Fitness, etc) make modules that are attached to the top of the machine. We had them at my office gym 10 years ago, and that was nothing fancy.

> You really have a TV on each machine at your gym? This is peak America

Some of the gyms in Melbourne Australia have TVs on all the treadmill machines. I am talking about normal gyms not some high end fancy gyms.

I think I’ve seen this in hotel gyms pretty much everywhere I’ve travelled, including Europe and Russia.

That is pretty common, this is the first one I've seen with Netflix and Bluetooth audio

Hulu runs ads even on the paid service. You have to pay extra on to remove them. They're fairly long, too, around 60-90 seconds every 15 minutes or so. Something about that really gets under my skin, but I'm honestly surprised it's not more prevalent on other services like Netflix.

I hope that the ease of competition on the Internet will make it so I can continue watching ad free TV. I expect Netflix to start increasing prices and adding advertising, it seems like it's just a matter of time. But I hope that new smaller competitors will pop up and I'll switch to those and watch their second rate programming; at least some of the time.

Netflix already runs (skippable but autoplaying) ads for its own original content between episodes of other things on its service.

I've never seen that, and we watch a lot of shows on Netflix. That sounds awful.

Content exclusivity makes the competitive market really hurt consumers, though. Netflix might stay relatively ad-free as a selling point, but what are you gonna do if Hulu (or one of the dozen other services) steals your favorite show from Netflix while you're halfway through? This has happened to me a couple times now and it's annoying, because I like Netflix, but if I wanna watch certain content I have to watch it on Hulu or whatever because that's the only option.

Point being, the competitive market means there's a strong incentive for services that are noticeably inferior (I'll keep picking on Hulu since they have tons of ads, bad UI, mediocre video quality etc) to license content out from under each other. This is obviously a bad state for the consumer, and clearly the impetus behind streaming services going gangbusters on their own original series, which is at least (mostly?) good for consumers.

I pay to remove ads on hulu and guess what, you still get ads every once and while. Mostly on kids shows for some reason.

> around 60-90 seconds every 15 minutes or so

Fairly long is relative. Compare that to TV where 15 minutes is the duration of ads, not interval between them...

It's annoying, but it's nowhere near as bad as 180 seconds of ads three times in a half hour, which is what you get with broadcast or cable TV.

The second Netflix try to run ads I'm cancelling and heading back to the great blue seas.

Having ditched satellite TV about 15 years, and relying on Amazon Prime (with only a single ad for another prime show before the video plays, on occasion), or Hulu (limited ads you can pay to get rid of), or Netflix (no ads at all... so far). When I had a chance to be exposed to cable TV recently, I couldn't believe how awful it was. You become desensitized to it, but on top of that, it's constantly been getting worse.

Hulu's ad breaks are significantly shorter than regular TV, and the ads are not 10 times louder than the shows. Ads don't have to be horrible, they're just made that way by design.

> To date, the actual revenues from cable advertising, which totaled about $45 million last year, are minuscule compared with the $11 billion for over-the-air television networks and stations. But scores of big companies, including General Foods, American Express, Procter & Gamble and Pepsico, are already cable advertisers, along with innumerable used-car dealers and other local businesses that can afford cable's relatively low rates. By 1990, according to Paul Kagan, publisher of several cable industry newsletters, cable advertising could exceed $2 billion.

Stunning.

We didn't have cable until the late 90s, and I don't have pay TV anymore, largely for this reason. "Premium" things are always dumbed down. First comes the ads, then the censorship. I'm not willing to pay for ad-laden, censored content, full stop. I happily pay for Spotify, but I won't pay for cable TV or XM.

XM was an interesting note there at the end. I realize they are still subject to FCC regulation but they seem mostly add free and uncensored.

The entire debt-based economy is based on extracting more money from consumers. Worth mentioning is this is not long after stagflation occurred in the late 1970s. As a side note, I have a strong feeling that in large corporations like Google expenses always tends to increase with revenue. One example would be housing and salaries, but there are probably others.

What does "debt-based" have to do with extracting money?

The current economy allow creation of an almost infinite amount of debt and has since at least 1971 I think. It should be obvious how such an economy incentivize extraction, one of the most obvious being credit cards.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/consumer-debt-is-set-to-reac...

https://www.creditkarma.com/studies/i/average-debt-american-...

When money is easy, the incentives switch to increasing consumption, rather than investment in increasing productivity. Why spend time and money inventing a better mousetrap when you could just buy ten more of them?

The principle applies at every level of the economy (individual, corporate, government etc)

And thinking about it, when something like the ad bubble drive up housing prices for example, other companies may have to participate too in order to pay competitive salaries.

I don't quite see how that follows necessarily - high investment allows for maximizing per unit costs compared to "paycheck to paycheck". Not that consumer debt bubbles aren't a thing.

In this case, we have been running a trade deficit since the 1970s.

It is a world reserve currency as well making a deficit pretty much inevitable as long as it holds. Getting goods in exchange for spreading your currency's reach sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Effectively it gives a "virtual economy size" from worldwide dollar users over just producing for the local economy - not doing so in response would be deflationary. They need some sort of goods or services in exchange so the economic backing is provided for any outflowing currency.

The point is that it destroys local manufacturing though, leading to more and more goods being imported.

>Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression...

Cable companies, even though they now act as ISPs, where never conceived to track you browsing history and do with it what they will. And somehow there's a wide spread assumption that they won't.

This is strange. I've consistently heard that it was a total myth cable was ever ad-free.

I distinctly recall the ad-free experience of my cousin's cable service circa 1980, in stark contrast with the broadcast reception my family had. I can't definitively say that there were no commercials on the channels we didn't bother with, but in essence it was certainly a commercial-free viewing experience. This was in the Denver area. By the early 90s things like home shopping network channels and infomercials were increasingly common, and we eventually ended up with common disruptive commercials. Perhaps your "myth" sources are too young to have actually experienced the early days of cable.

Around that time we had the Showtime channel and there was not (and still no third-party advertising?).

Of course when the "basic cable" started a few years later, for example MTV, those channels always had commercials.

Australian cable (Foxtel) was ad-free until 2000-ish if anyone can remember?

I had Austar around that time, and it was kind of ad free. They advertised other shows on that channel, and sometimes other channels, but there wasn't any ads for products. But I remember around the early 2000's that started to change.

Not the US, but in Bolivia in the late 90s cable was essentially ad free. My favorite channel was "The Sony Channel", they had stuff like Dawson's Creek (don't judge!) and Seinfeld ad free. Because those shows had spots for commercial breaks they stuck music videos in between. Ok, maybe that isn't completely ad free, the music videos were essentially ads for Sony's music artists, but it was better than regular commercials.

I remember the early-1980s cable landscape, when the only "cable" channels were what we could call premium channels now: HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, etc.; all the other channels were local over-the-air stations.

We got cable in 1981 and it was exactly this. None of the “cable” (premium) channels had ads. Some of them, like Nickelodeon, did add ads in the late 80’s.

I remember asking my mother "what is cable TV?" when I was a kid and I still remember she said, "It's when you pay for TV so you don't get ads." This must have been 30 years ago.

The internet didn't used to have ads or spam either.

Relatively speaking, most of the time the internet has been around, spam and ads have been around. Spam on nntp predates the web, iirc. Bots in the messenger apps were unforgivingly ruthless, and email has had spam at least since the early 90's.

Also, even shows that did have ads, it wasn't nearly as much. If you look at say Buck Rogers, iirc it's about 48 minutes per episode with credits, and back then they didn't share space for credits with ads. Today a lot of shows are as little as 34-38 minutes to an hour of programming. That's 30-40% of your viewing time being advertising. Not to mention product placement and other ad channels in the content.

Not to mention the crap that's happened to youtube that's made it hard to follow/watch channels with content you want to follow in favor of engagement algorithms. It starts to suck pretty badly all around. The last update to my Nvidia Shield TV brought ads into youtube there too, where there weren't any until a few weeks ago.

My GF uses Hulu's "live tv" services, which aren't bad, but still have all the ads, are painful. I'd still rather use torrents, even if I am paying for content.

The existence of cable ads is useful to me when my ISP tries to upsell me on television service.

"Cable? I haven't had that for about fifteen years. Does it still have ads?"

"Yes, sir."

"No thanks, then!"

Will bears sell toilet paper in the woods?

This is one of the wittiest replies I've seen here.

Downvotes must have been because they didn't get it.

Wait until BCIs like Neuralink come out. Then there will be no way to escape ads.

Apparently, Betteridge's law of headlines doesn't always hold up.

On a more serious note, it will be interesting to see if currently, ad-free on-demand services will undergo the same transition.

I could see a dual tier approach like Hulu. The ad supported tier is only $5 a month

Of course they will.

Netflix is rumored to start advertising between episodes

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/22/how-to-opt-out-of-new-ad-tes...

They are pushing their own programming (trying to encourage consumption of the programming that you already have access to and already paid for). I don't think it's fair to the conversation to compare it with the umbrella of commercial endorsements.

If you can't opt out of it it's pretty damn fair to make the comparison.

It might be more fair to compare to public broadcasting stations. BBC doesn't have paid commercials but they do advertise their own programming between shows.

Ignoring that you can opt out, if you can't understand the difference between information and advertising that is your own failing.

Sure I understand the difference, but that doesn't make one better than the other.

Netflix interrupting what I chose to watch with something that I did not chose to watch is (in my subjective experience) pretty much equally bad whether it's information about other Netflix shows or an advert for breakfast cereal.

(Also is there an actual "I don't want to see these any more, permanently" option? Or are you just talking about the ability to skip each individual one manually?)

(Edit 2: also how is it not advertising? Just because it's advertising their own product doesn't mean it isn't advertising.)

>Netflix interrupting what I chose to watch

Well no, they didn't. They put it between auto-play episodes. Auto-play, as an aside, is pushing an additional episode that you did not choose to watch. A preview of the next episode is a preview that you did not choose to watch. Both are about engagement.

>also how is it not advertising? Just because it's advertising their own product doesn't mean it isn't advertising

Their own product that you already have paid for and can watch at no additional cost, and at no additional incremental revenue for Netflix. Yes, they are trying to make sure that you enjoy the product and continue subscribing, but it's a world different from trying to sell you a chocolate bar or laundry soap.

These discussions on HN turn absurd because people like to engage in absurd rhetoric to engage in an emotional plea to exaggerate something. It's boring.

What you're arguing seems absurd to me. Auto-play is just playing the next episode in a series, that is what I chose to watch.

I don't need Netflix to "make sure that you enjoy the product and continue subscribing" by making my viewing experience worse, when I run out of stuff to watch I'm perfectly capable of browsing the library myself, or looking up suggestions online.

"If you can't opt out" was a qualifier, not an assertion. I don't use Netflix and didn't research how the feature works.

The idea that the "information" they provide is not at all intended to modify your behavior is laughable.

Okay, but your own ignorance isn't relevant to the fact that your spittle-laden reply wasn't relevant.

>The idea that the "information" they provide is not at all intended to modify your behavior is laughable.

Strangely I made no such claim. You're 0 for 2 now but strangely it doesn't stop you.

Isn't how cable networks started and people made that exact same argument on why it was ok?

I have no idea. I do know that the "something followed this path, therefore anything on that path is evil" argument is, and has always been, specious and a dead end.

My point is why makes you think netflix won't follow the same path?

One factor is that it's much easier to switch off Netflix (or any other internet-based streaming service) than it was (until recently) to switch off cable TV.

It's not a rumor, they already do this. At least when you watch their original programs you see ads for more of their original programs. Thankfully you can skip them, they just try to show a trailer for one of their own shows / movies basically.

Edit:

I usually see it during the phase where Netflix is about to autoplay another episode, it tries to show it through then, I usually skip it cause it's stupid, I don't want to be fed the same trailer 500 times...

I think there is a difference between "house ads" for other content, versus Nike trying to sell me sneakers.

However, I think that difference is smaller than most in house placement marketers think -- those I have talked to are genuinely surprised that I'd object to their own "programming."

For me, anything that tries to force me to take an action or spend (waste) my time or attention is an "ad" and is inherently bad.

As far as I'm concerned they're exactly the same. I pay netflix so I can watch shows of my choice, if you interrupt the show of my choice with something that is not the show of my choice I don't really care what the interruption was exactly, it's just bad.

To be fair they do it at the end of a show, while the countdown happens, I can't say it's not the best compromise because it's genius, the countdown to the next show is plain but ad-free otherwise, my issue is seeing the exact same ads overtime. If something might be interesting to me, that's what your front-page recommendations are for aka "suggested for you" maybe a new tier "Netflix Originals Suggested for You" wouldn't hurt.

I'd happily opt for no ads period. Netflix should stick to advertising brands within their shows if anything, I don't mind in-show ads, as long as they're not too damn obvious. I was watching Bones once and they paused the whole premise to showcase a self-parking parallel parking car... Really?

How about a compromise where I pay for a service and get it.

If they want to pay me to watch their advert then fine, pay me say 50 cents and I'll watch a 10 second advert.

How about that for a compromise?

Possibly, Hulu already does this and Netflix is rumored to start doing it soon.

However, an important difference between old TV and current-day streaming is that it is much easier to pirate shows that are streaming. There is an (ad-)free alternative to Hulu and Netflix that is becoming easier to use. At some point, streaming services may have to compete by not including ads.

> However, an important difference between old TV and current-day streaming is that it is much easier to pirate shows that are streaming.

As someone who grew up recording (and distributing to friends) one-to-many streams (a.k.a. terrestrial TV), I wonder how it got easier. Just because nobody is using personalized watermarks to prove copyright infringement yet, does not mean a redistributor today ain't going to get sued tomorrow.

You can create an account with gift cards paid in cash, so I wish them good luck.

In the US. Good luck in other countries[1].

[1] I've been to much more countries where the currency of choice is top-up cards for mobile phones. Master- and VISA-cards issued by local banks are usually only usable for national transactions - not to speak of gift cards, which just don't exist.

In New Zealand you can buy prepaid credit cards with cash (and no personal information) that work anywhere visa/mastercard is accepted afaik.

I'm not talking about Master/VISA gift cards, I'm talking about Netflix gift cards. I'm not in the US, yet they are readily available.

According to [1], they seem to be available at least in the US, Canada, Australia, many European countries, Brazil, Malaysia and Japan. That's far from the whole world, but quite enough as a source of potential pirates.

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/32950/br

Hulu/Hulu Plus always advertised. I was very excited a year or two ago when they finally offered ad-free streaming for an additional few dollars.

I was surprised that it took so long, those ads are not very valuable.

My beef with Hulu wasn’t that there were ads, it was that there was one ad. I think it was Tampax Pearls when I was watching.

I’m at the same point with MLB.tv. I get nauseous every time I hear about Pudge Rodriguez’s journey to Cooperstown thanks to Bank of America visa or the all new Chevy Traverse and its collection of JD Power awards.

It's kind of weird when the don't have ads and the skip to the MLB will be right back screen.. You realize how many ads a baseball has. It's not like they show the warm up for the inning or anything or the 7th inning stretch.. nope just blank. I'd appreciate an MLB service that actually just kept playing through that.

Amazon Prime includes “ads” for their own shows. I call them ads because they are on before the show I’m watching and I don’t want to watch them. Luckily, for now, I can still skip them.

I thought I noticed that on an Amazon fire. It doesn't happen on my lg tv though.

So does HBO..

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