TV networks vowed to cut back on commercials but stuffed in more
latimes.com
latimes.com
It's important to understand that late in its lifecycle a business often knows that the end is near and consequently reduces its value proposition and focuses on extracting as much value from customers as possible before it's too late.
That's exactly the situation with network TV now, and the article says as much. Networks are losing viewers and cranking up the ads to meet short term profit targets, which cause them to lose more viewers. They do it because network TV has no long term future anyway. They know that Netflix, Prime, and the streaming model are murdering their aging business that was designed in a different era. They know this is not a battle they can win. So they are working on their own alternatives like CBS All Access Pass and milking the old cash cow for whatever's left before the end comes.
Meanwhile if you're still watching conventional network TV, they're just going to screw you till the cows come home with a progressively shittier product because that's what a business in its end stages does.
The most valuable commodity of today is your attention. Never in history have other people (i.e. firms) had so many ways to bombard you with things that attempt to command and manipulate your attention for their own purposes (i.e. making money). As a consequence, your attention has become extremely scarce and valuable. Network TV is now 12min of advertising per hour. Why are you giving away 20% of the most valuable thing you possess for free? Are the (increasingly lame) shows really that good?
Take back your life from the attention mongers. Cut the cord, switch to Netflix, set up uBlock and a PiHole, never look back.
Whatever happened to stuff like Star Trek where each episode could be stand-alone, or a series was complete with closure? Crappy series cliff hangers never got me to tune into the next series - liking the progression of the story, the acting etc did.
Ironically I gave up broadcast commercial TV about the same time ago as you - because it had got too much with the adverts, and American direction. That was long before product placement in the UK, and a couple of liberalisations of regulation. When I visit friends now I am struck how comically often and terrible ads are. My memory says they used to try a bit harder and managed to get them at least competently produced and directed.
I used to love watching Myth Busters but it became so much like that it was ridiculous. There was a time you could download torrents of Myth Busters episodes with all the recaps removed.
It also wasn’t a purely American thing. Go watch some of the old black-and-white Dr. Who episodes, for example; you’ll see some prime examples of cliffhanger- and recap-dominated television.
The exception seems to be late-20th-century television shows, where the syndication system meant that episodes might be dropped or reordered arbitrarily by the local station. This made it difficult to impossible to have any kind of changing circumstances like an overarching plot except at big events like season breaks. Star Trek: TNG is a good example here; the interpersonal relationships between characters don’t really evolve very much, and when they do it’s part of a season-break spanning two-part story. Those reliably had every character in danger at the break to provide the studio leverage during contract negotiations.
As the premium television channels started getting into producing their own shows, they didn’t have the problem of local affiliates reshuffling their schedule— their distribution model let shows have an overall plot, but they still add to be acceptable for viewers that expected to get a whole story each week. This gave us shows like Stargate SG-1 which still had very formulaic episodes, but also a continuity between them.
You also started to have the national networks assert more control over the local stations which led to some successful attempts at shows with both series- and episode-long plot structures, like Babylon 5 & the West Wing. Vestiges of the old system remained for quite a while, though, and is a large part of why Firefly was never commercially successful— it was produced with continuity from episode to episode in mind, but the network aired them in a seemingly random order instead.
Most episodes would reach something more akin to a convenient place to pause - more like the reel break and intermission in old movies. Reach a local conclusion for whatever episode story was playing out, pick it up with a new episode arc next week, alongside continuing the character development and series arcs.
Interesting US network background I wasn't aware of. I'm fascinated by the idea networks would play series out of order, which on the face of it seems incredibly dumb. They're all the same length. Surely out of order would hurt the local station too, by losing viewers and potentially advertisers when stuff stops making sense?
Part of the issue was that show production was pipelined and unreliable. It sometimes happened that the “next” episode wasn’t ready in time for air but a later one was, and the network would rather show something new than a repeat. The show producers and writers knew this, too, so a style developed that didn’t include any long-term character development- each episode was a self-contained short story instead of a chapter in a novel.
This meant that, in the off season, local stations felt free to pick and choose individual episodes based on ratings without regard for anything else which further reinforced the style of having at least one self-contained story in each episode, which persisted long after the original constraints were lifted.
I only ever saw the US edits of the old Dr. Who shows, so the recaps may have been added to help it fit into the local TV mindshare.
The UK experience was more how you describe Babylon 5 etc - a show plot that concluded with the episode, but theme and character development across the series. Even the classics from the 70s and 80s. Some were so smooth a transition it actually did seem like getting a glimpse a week later, rather than an artificially exciting episode. To modern eyes that looks pretty dull, though that's partly camera and production techniques too, yet did seem to allow smoother development.
Dr Who was actually quite the exception there with 26 and even more in the earliest years! US seems to be 15 or unbelievable. They start to feel too long, even shows I enjoy, or perhaps ideas or budget get spread too thin, especially in 2nd and subsequent seasons.
That’s not what happened.
There are two reasons why serialized shows were not popular on network TV until recently.
Syndication - the networks always had control over what got sued during prime time. But they also made most of their money via syndication outside of prime time and with the cable channels. It’s really hard to syndicate serialized shows for the second reason...
If you miss either the first few episodes of a serialized show or miss an episode in between, you probably wouldn’t even bother about watching it. Now with video on demand via streaming the TV networks can tell the audience to catch up by going to the website/going to their cable providers VOD offerings, etc.
Netflix - serialized shows are very popular on Netflix where binge watching is a thing. Even the cable channels that buy syndication rights can also offer catchup/and video on demand.
It's not the top reason I switched to Netflix (and now a couple other streaming services), but it's the top reason that keeps me from going back.
When I travel and try to watch TV in a hotel, the commercials make it unbearable, I'll burn data from my cell phone before I'd try to watch anything on TV. I'm not sure if the commercials have really gotten worse or if I've just lost my tolerance for them.
When I moved and signed up for cable internet (sadly comcast was my only choice) they offered a year of free basic cable, I declined since I knew I wouldn't watch it.
For my “promo” price I had to get cable. I simply convinced them to not send me the cable box.
In the same way that processed food has gotten tastier, commercials have gotten more attention grabbing. Whether that's "worse" or "better" depends on your perspective, but it's the result of a competitive marketplace.
Luckily I have unlimited data on both my phone and iPad.
Edit: What I mean is, nobody acts in real life like they do in commercials. I feel dumber watching people behave that way. I get it's supposed to be persuasive but something about modern commercials just irks me to no end.
I actually enjoy seeing new commercials, and so long as I only watched TV at friends a couple of times a year, I found it enjoyable.
There is a science to all of it, and it’s very effective, even if we’d like to think we’re immune to advertising.
That’s exactly what I did when watching TV growing up in the 90s, before DVRs.
I guess it’s sort of a form of “channel surfing”.
Great, more ads targeted at children... normalize ad viewership when they're young so the future customers won't demand fewer ads. Time for TNT et al to adapt to the new model or fade away.
I don't have any data to back it up, but intuitively I think ads targeted at children are the most cost effective kinds of ads nowadays and as generations grow up this will become more true and true. Kids have a lot of influence over their parent's purchasing decisions when it comes to relatively cheap things (I'd guess that threshold is around $500 dollars since that is what video game consoles tend to cost) and children have not yet developed critical thinking to see through an ad's lies. It's a lot easier for an ad to convince a child that he wants something than to convince an adult or even a teenager, and usually you don't even have to bother with making a good product (think back to all the toy commercials that sold cheap plastic things that broke after a couple of uses), the child can then go on to convince their parent to purchase the thing.
As more generations grow up getting used to ads, eventually only young children will be the only demographic not immune to ads, thus you will see more ads targeted at children just because they're the only direct ads that work, while ads for adults will move to different formats such as native advertising, paid reviews, product placement, etc.
I don't think that works - I grew up in the age of cartoons with ads and they are definitely not something I'll put up with.
Considering how strongly Netflix fought against the analysts prediction that they will have to run ads, I'm quite curious where the advertisers will go once the cable is "gone".
This all will come eventually to online and large portion to UGC platforms supporting video, so YouTube, FB, Twitter, ...
Maybe more people will start paying for premium version if available (like YouTube Red).
As a parent this is doubly so. I know everything my children watch and I don't want them exposed to excessive advertising. I also don't let them watch content on YouTube that has excessive advertising in the show itself. I'll gladly pay money for ad free content that is designed to both entertain and educate.
I have no idea why someone in Australia would have Foxtel now if they don't watch sport
The shows would then be able to run their own ads, at whatever interval they wanted, with whatever advertisers they wanted, or they could make all their money through "native advertising" (product placement). The networks could even facilitate the ad buys.
This feels like a better and more workable model. It's like how websites work, where they get to chose how many ad boxes and where those ad boxes go, and then use a network to facilitate the transaction.
And then a toy company could make a cartoon and show it ad free on Saturday morning as a marketing expense like back in the 80s!
Product placements are a one-time thing and a tv show isn't shown once but hundreds or thousands of times across different geographical regions and accross time (there are still shows from the 60s being aired).
On the other hand, TV commercials are very time and place dependant; maybe Coca Cola can afford an ad on national tv but a local station is more likely to show an ad for a local furniture company -and get revenues from that ad.
Relying only on product placement and asking the distributor of the show to pay for it to be aired would require product placement to be massively expensive as it would need to pay for national and all local tv stations costs.
The nature of advertisement makes it valuable mostly for limited amount of time and to a limited target audience. That makes sponsors less likely to be able bear the huge cost of product placement relative to the impact that placement can have.
This idea also means that TV stations would only be able to air a very limited set of shows: those that can afford to pay them, meaning that most local stations would not be able to show anything, either because they are too big and expensive, or too small and don't have a suitable target audience for the show's embedded advertisement.
On top of that, it would require tv shows to raise massive amounts of cash to be able to afford to be aired. This would kill any small production and we would end up with large corporations basically having to optimise the shows for their advertisement potential as they wouldn't survive otherwise. We're just going to end-up with shows that will be little more than hour-long commercials instead...
Frankly, in what way is any of that an advantage over the current crappy situation?
Alex Jones on AM/FM radio works something like that. They give away the show for free but keep some of the ad time (some for the syndication network, some for Alex Jones)
His current model of selling useless/dangerous crap is having trouble since Alex has consistently violated the morals clauses in Visa & Mastercard's payment processing terms. First Data let him violate said terms for nearly a decade before the payment networks caught on and cracked down.
Religious networks, home shopping, infomercials.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/94522
https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/ad-types#stra...
I wish this was the future of advertising.
Commercials/ads should be patterned after a weather model. 9 months out of the year, consumers pay it no mind, and when it happens, it is a hard shock, meaning some people push through and others avoid it entirely.
In the 3 "bad" weather months, there is a rise (1), a sustain (2), and a decline to normalcy (3). Month 2 is wall to wall commercials. Everyone knows August, for the sake of example, is just commercials.Everyone knows July and September are lousy with commercials. Consumers and producers adjust accordingly.
In the 9 month normal, there are scattered showers of commercials, maybe the occasional thunderstorm (elections, sporting events, mass shootings, etc.). In the 3 month bad weather period, the paradigm is Superbowl.
By scheduling the big ad push, companies and producers will be motivated to create content worth watching. I abhor sportsball of any type, but I watch Superbowl commercials religiously. They (we) spend ludicrous amounts for the Superbowl because of the guaranteed eyeballs. This model leverages that concept. Imagine ad campaigns with real story arcs. Good acting, exquisite props and locations, viral explosions of excellent ads. Of course some people will just check out, but most people will flock to a 1-3 month period of atraditional media.
PBS is massive disappoint, the few times I've watched of late.
It's an insanity. They don't even attempt to make their programs more appealing in order to ensure bigger advertisement exposure. They just stuff everything with ads and apparently the advertisers are desperate -- or stupid -- enough to eat the deal every time.
There is real value in some the ads. Useful household items or cleaning agents or personal hygiene products are changing periodically and it is good to be somewhat informed.
But they take it too far. Furthermore, most grocery store clerks will be very happy to recommend you good products because they don't make money through affiliation; the have fixed wages. So you can not watch TV like I do and still mostly never miss out on anything.
This became too long but I guess my overall point was that the TV networks seem to try and milk one last cow before dying as opposed to investing their current profits in better products outside TV. They are accelerating their own end, they know it but attempt to squeeze as much money as possible regardless. It's ugly.
Uh, no thanks.
Both of these will allow increased commercials with no reduction in viewership. If you were going to cut the cord you would have done it already.
Back around 2008, he would come to my house and love watching movies on my TV connected to my Mac Mini running Front Row. The original Apple remote was a thing of simplicity and beauty.
I moved on to a Roku box running Plex and he still liked it, but it was more complicated, easier to misclick something and he would struggle to get back. He eventually got the hang of it. But by then, his hearing was declining and he kept having to juggle multiple remotes to turn the sound up and down.
Fast forward to 2017, we had a Roku TV with one remote to control everything and it made life a little easier. He could navigate the different apps and find enough to keep him entertained.
So I bought him a 49 inch TCL Roku TV ($350) and then the problems started.
- I have gigabit Ethernet up and down, reliable WiFi that never drops below 200Mbps and wired Ethernet throughout the house - my internet connection is reliable. They live in a small town with 50Mbps cable internet that’s not reliable. There is nothing so frustrating as having your video cut out in the middle and having buffering when you’ve been use to cable for the last 40 years.
- Data caps - we don’t have them, he does. He never had to worry about data caps when watching video.
- signing in. For some reason, the video on demand channels that he can get via his cable login keeps making him re authorize. That means he has to go to a computer or his phone to activate the channel - he’s not going to do that. I ended up just deleting all of those channels. He never had to do that with his cable.
- searching. The search interface is alien to a cable user.
- I signed him in to my Amazon Prime account but he’s afraid to use it because he doesn’t want to accidentally buy a movie since Amazon mixes in free with Prime, for rent and movies you have to purchase.
- if he logs into Netflix with someone else’s profile he sees a different set of movies. Once he watches all of the suggested movies on his profile, he thinks that’s all there is. He doesn’t search for other movies.
If he does want to switch to cable, he has to switch to another connection (even though it’s clearly labeled as cable) and use another remote. We use DirecTVNow for cable, it’s just another app.
Edit:
Did I mention that my Plex server that I signed him into doesn’t have 5 9s uptime. If it isn’t running when he wants to watch a movie, he will avoid it for weeks. No matter how often I describe the difference between Plex - that runs on my computer - and Netflix.
The last article talks about a study including the type of people OP mentioned. They don't mind cable and commercials but end up being cord cutters anyway because of loss of control over the channels included.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonifitzgerald/2019/07/24/yikes...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonifitzgerald/2019/06/29/portr...
This is more TV / scheduled video than traditional PSTN / data services then. Though AT&T aren't doing great in either of those markets either.
Or just let them implode upon themselves.
On some programs it is pretty much a 50/50 split.
No thanks. Got way better to do with my time.
1. If I'm watching live, I work on the New York Times crossword puzzle on my iPad during the commercials. The puzzle comes out at 10 PM New York Time for the following day (6 PM for the Sunday and Monday puzzles). I'm 3 hours behind, so I get them at 7 PM, which fits in nicely with evening TV watching.
2. If I'm watching on DVR, I use one of two convenient features of the Comcast X1 DVR for skipping.
2a. If it is a top HD program on NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CW, Bravo, HGTV, Discovery, MTV or TLC, and it is more than something like a couple hours after the broadcast ended, there is a good chance "Smart Resume" is enabled for it. If that is indeed enabled, the timeline display shows commercials marked in yellow, and starting FF (or FFx2, FFx3, etc) while in the yellow area automatically switches back to normal play at the end of the commercial segment.
So, as soon as I see the break start, I hit the FF button a few times to get to the fastest FF speed, and it then takes just a few seconds to skip the commercials and resume the program.
If you have not heard of "Smart Resume", join the club. I too was surprised when it showed up suddenly. Apparently it has been available as an experimental feature in a few markets for a while, but you had to specifically enable it. Sometime in the last few months, they apparently promoted it to a standard feature and enabled it.
2b. If "Smart Resume" is not available for the recording, I hit the microphone enable button on the remote and say "skip 3 minutes" (or whatever my best guess at the length of the break is--it's pretty consistent for a given break position in a given show). If I still see commercial after that, I'll skip a little more. Most shows do the promos for other shows on their network at the end of commercial blocks, and those are usually shorter than outside commercials, so it is usually easy to tell if I should do another minute skip, or just 20 or 30 seconds.
The X1 voice interface is pretty good and responsive, so this works well. It does occasionally mess up and take "skip 3 minutes" or "fast forward 3 minutes" as a search term instead of a command, but not often enough to be annoying.
It's interesting that ad skipping has finally made its way into the cable companies' own DVRs. It used to be that they got sued just for having a "skip 30s" button, while users of MythTV had automatic ad skipping without even having to use FF and watch them on high speed.
Vertical integration has killed so many interesting things.
I didn't even finish the show.