Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)
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You can forgive broadcast TV - someone had money to spend and wanted to hawk floor wax to the ethos excessively. But lets look at YouTube for example - their algorithms are supposed to be so sophisticated but I’m outside every desirable demographic except maybe not dead, I don’t impulse buy, I don’t have any wax able floors, if I did I would switch apartments before waxing them, and I downvote, skip, or just kill the youtube app every time I see a commercial. I should be number one in the lost cause file, but instead they keep showing me the same stuff that I’ve already downloaded, skipped, stopped transferring countless times. How do you explain that in the era of machine learning and no holds barred privacy invasion?
European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you will get is the one your insurance covers?
I have a hard time reconciling what (little) I know about in the US medical system between insurance behavior, doctor choice, and ads aimed at patient choice.
I understand ads for non prescription drugs and little things like cough, but ads for HIV treatment I can't fathom.
As for your question, while the ad might be massively bad targeting for you, it might still be the best they have where you fit in the restriction set by the ad publisher, so better they get money on a poor match than no money at all. Usually a publisher that has terrible targeting.
And they actually ask you to speak to your doctor about the drug. Haha what? Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? And if I don't trust his/her treatment plan then why not switch to a different doctor?
> Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have?
Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in an imperfect world where sub-optimal choices are made due to time constraints, lack of knowledge/experience, etc. Doctors are not exempt from this same phenomenon, in fact it may be amplified because there's just so much more knowledge you need to index and access compared to programming. Just as you don't know about every web framework in existence, doctors don't know about every medicine in existence.
"Ask your web designer to see if using Svelte is right for you."
There's been some research into this subject, and, in this case, it would seem that you are indeed advocating for the devil. I haven't read any of the papers myself, but the stories I've heard via channels such as the Science-Based Medicine blog or PusCast suggest that drug advertising - both to doctors and direct to consumers - tends to result in both higher health care costs and poorer patient outcomes, because it increases the odds that a doctor will prescribe a more expensive and less safe or less effective (or at least no more safe or effective) drug.
It's supposedly down to the drug companies' incentive structures. Once a patent expires, they often start tweaking the molecule to come out with new drugs that behave similarly, but are chemically different enough to qualify for a new patent. They then sink a lot of money into trying to convince doctors to prescribe it instead. Their avenue for doing this is advertising, which doesn't have to clear nearly as high an evidentiary bar as any of the scientific channels for disseminating information.
>Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand?
Are you implying non technical users would somehow be able to make a crucial technical design decision because they saw an ad somewhere? That seems quite absurd.
In my professional experience, every time a non technical stakeholder has tried to force a specific technology to solve a complex problem, it has been disastrous.
No, and in fact I am against TV advertisements of prescription medications. However, what I am challenging is the attitude Europeans (and some Americans) have that doctors should never be questioned, for they always know what's best and you should just shut up and follow their advice.
See, general practitioners have a very small amount of time to understand and diagnose your problem, draw the correct solution from their vast stores of knowledge, and prescribe something before moving to the next patient. In most cases they don't have time to stew about what your disease might be for hours and hours on end.
But guess who does have time to stew and research for hours, days, and months? The patient. And in the cases of chronic diseases, the patients can often become more expert in their disease (and related medicines and side-effects) than your average general practitioners.
So in summary, I believe:
- No, we should not allow TV adverts for prescription drugs
- Yes, patients should do online research about their diseases, including potential treatments and drugs
- Yes, patients should ask their doctor questions and make suggestions, presenting findings they've gathered
- Yes, patients shouldn't hesitate in getting a second opinion from a different doctor. Not all doctors have the same experience level.
- No, doctors should not bristle at this but encourage research, correcting misconceptions and answering their patients' questions. It's their body, after all
I don't understand. Are you saying you frequently have non-technical customers of your software business asking for specific languages, design patterns and frameworks which end up being the optimal choices? In my personal experience this has never been the case. Also somehow I feel like it would be even worse if they heard about them from TV instead of from a generic blog post somewhere.
A lot of people have arthritis, but don't go to the doctor. They'll pop some pain killers and deal with it like humans have forever. But a Humira commercial is designed to get them to ask their doctor about it.
Partially its get your doctor thinking about maybe updating your treatment. A lot of people just coast on whatever they've been taking for a long time. I've heard occasionally Doctors find patients who are medicines that are quite outdated.
Now all that might be worse than no advertising, but there are reasons behind it.
Of course. But how does the doctor know about my problem if I don't ask about it?
There are a lot of people with treatable conditions who have no idea that it's (1) a medical condition and/or (2) now treatable.
These ads will cause some of these people to go get treatment. That's undeniably good. How big that effect is, or if it's outweighed by bad effects, I can't say, of course.
All the incentives happily align.
Talked to my doctor about it. Got a prescription, took the medication for several years. It changed my life for the better.
So I may have assumed that yes but then if not it goes back to my original parent point of it being a sign of a broken system.
Don't neglect to account that it may be that as you grow older, you are more likely to encounter these types of ads because the drug companies target older consumers as they are more likely to need the product.
The usual format is lots of images of happy people walking in parks and spending time with family while a narrator says the drug name a dozen times and what it treats, then reads off a long list of side effects and warnings “blah-blah should not be taken by pregnant women, women planning to become pregnant”, “blah-blah should not be taken by smokers or those with reduced immune function”, “blah-blah may cause liver and kidney failure”, “deaths have occurred while taking blah-blah”.
Personally that makes me want to go suck on a soup bone and hope for the best, but for the larger population the ads are apparently very effective and scores of people who see them will go pressure their doctors to prescribe them or shop around for a doctor that will prescribe them. (Drug store clinics will pretty much prescribe anything if you can articulate having symptoms it treats - conflict of interest is obvious)
> do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that?
No, but I imagine patients liable to the advertising might mention a specific medication in a conversation with their doctor. Whether that has any effect depends on the advertisement/patient/doctor.
> Does your opinion override that of the doctor?
For prescription drugs, no.
The vast majority of TV viewing in the UK is on BBC, amazon prime, netflix or disney plus, and thus doesn't contain commercials, just adverts for other shows from the same provider. The rest of the stuff is mainly aimed at old people sat at home - visited my nan today, who had some terrible channel on (channel 65 or something). Adverts were almost entirely for stairlifts and to leave money to charities in wills.
Ads during the day are either for old people or stay at home moms.
About 15 years ago there was a huge debate about whether we should allow “American-style” supercasinos but we just did it through sport instead.
As a patient, you don't get to choose what drugs a doctor prescribes to you. But you do get to choose (to an extent) your doctor. So if you ask a doctor about a particular prescription, and it's within the sphere of treatment options they would evaluate for you, then they'll usually give you that option. If for no other reason than to pacify you and prevent you from doctor shopping until one does give it to you.
To that end, medical marketing tends to work twofold: a salesforce focused on "educating" doctors on a particular medication, and patient advertising to get patients requesting it more. Doctors tend to have a go-to grab bag of treatment options they're familiar with and tend to prescribe, so both of these work to accelerate how quickly a particular new blockbuster gets its way onto that shortlist for any particular doctor.
Insurance companies, traditionally, operate as a backstop to prevent this from going overboard. Since they act as payor for both the physician and prescription, if they deny claims it can impede uptake. So they can put in place things like documentation requirements, prior authorization[1], and prescription formularies. That said, components of the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare) capped the profitability of insurance companies as a percentage of total revenue. Which doesn't really reconcile with trying to reign in costs, as runaway medical spending just means runaway premiums they can justify charging, and the absolute value of their percentage-based cap goes up.
[1] https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=4...
US TV costs something like $78b a year (based on 36% of $220b [0]), or $600 per household, on top of cable costs.
If 25% of adverts are for prescription drugs, then $150 a year of health spending is what you pay for the 6 minutes an hour of tedious healthcare adverts. (There's another $450 extra you pay when buying mattresses or whatever else is advertised on TV)
[0] https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Total-US-Ad-Spending-See-L...
To entirely ignore the broader point of your post: The HIV drug ads I see are about prevention, not treatment. Along the lines of "If you're at increased risk for HIV (you're a man who has sex with men), then you should take our new variety of PrEP, and reduce your risk of infection."
For reference the only medicine ads you would see on tv here would be for every day things (paracetamol, eye drops, ...) or for BS like homeopathy.
Advertising, as a whole, is one of the most inefficient use of man-power capitalism has ever created. Intelligent people who have been failed for the US education system(chasing the goal of 'be whatever you want to be... but there is no sustainable way) usually end up there in some fashion.
This glut of capable but ineffectual intellectuals is either helping the ponzi fiat money scheme or if this virus is a 12 month affair with limited buying leads to mass civil unrest.
The demographics of the ad companies skew left... which is ok as long as we don't get into South American Currency Territory which i think the petro dollar should keep away for the time being.
Let's assume renters don't generally wax their floors, and cheap shitty floors don't need waxing. So we're looking for people likely to own a home nice enough too have wooden floors worth maintaining. You could probably do worse than to show that commercial to "highly-educated people with children, working in fields adjacent to software engineering."
I don't have a problem paying for subs, I use Apple Music and used Spotify, I like Netflix or Prime. But Google/Youtube is unethical with their ads. Yesterday I saw an ad showing "the police kidnapping people in california" from a Russian account. No way to report it anymore, now way to prove it was true, a blatant example of trying to influence people negatively.
I'll support the content creators I like directly now via other methods. If youtube can't at least remove blatantly false "ads" then they don't deserve my support.
Advertisements have all the downsides, are used in tremendously unethical ways including abhorrent views and as a malware propagation network. It is my duty to put heavy adblockers on as a layer of protection.
And it's none of their concern what I download to my computer. If they want to do more serverside logic to make sure I download their crap,it's going right in to /dev/null
The serving part is likely almost free since YouTube doesn't pay much for bandwidth. [0]
[0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/19/yout...
NewPipe also supports other services such as SoundCloud, MediaCCC and PeerTube right out of the box. The killer feature for me is that you can make up playlists containing media from different sources (which I use for playlists containing music from both YouTube and SoundCloud).
(I'm not involved in NewPipe, except being a very happy user).
Slightly annoying, but I don't utilize auto play, so I don't have to worry about it stopping my playlist or passive watching.
I have come to believe that over a period of time producers and consumers both will realise that the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them.
Less cynical thoughts;
1. I don’t know if and what kind of controls/flexibility YouTube allows on demand side, but it could be a “foot meet gun” story. ie advertiser is new to platform and messed up targeting and/or is over-bidding.
2. Advertiser might think 1 cent CPM is worth it, no one else bothers to bid on your data (based on your description) - still kinda ties into cynical view.
Rational self interest, as they say.
Google provides a platform for advertisers to use. The sophistication of that usage, however, is up to the marketers actually using it. At a small scale, it's relatively easy to bootstrap the type of integrated infrastructure and execution required for sophisticated campaigns. But at scale, marketing programs require so much people-coordination (between various internal departments and external agencies) that relatively few firms end up in an operationally mature state to attempt to integrate sophisticated technical and data operations as well.
Anecdotally speaking, the morass of font licensing[1] is likely to have an order of magnitude more attention in a typical campaign than something as seemingly critical as the actual ad targeting or frequency caps.
I stopped watching TV a long time ago and feel way more peaceful. While browsing online I am using adblockers anyway and wonder how long until I cannot access content this way. If it stops working I will stop using and theres no turning back to advertising to me, it doesnt work and irritates me.
I would like to see a micropayments system for online content but with the option to plus/minus up the microdonnation based on whether i found the content useful, whether it was clickbait, etc. It would be great to be able to pay more for a movie that i liked and less on a movie i couldnt stand and didn’t finish watching.
There's a story from a few years ago about how Target knew customers knew themselves, but they were smart enough to mix the diaper discounts in with some lawnmower specials so it would not arouse suspicions.
I would not be surprised if the algorithms know more than they seem.
Google might know you are a lost cause but they don't actually care, they still sold the impression.
Anyway you might have Google targeting turned off, which is why you're seeing ads for floor wax instead of whatever saas is advertising on YouTube that day you happened to read a blog post about.
I wish there was a global way to subscribe to and pay for content in a market/app-independant way.
If you are not in the USA, Canada or UK, your options to pay for the most popular, newest content are very, very limited. And if you are in a very small and/or somewhat impoverished country, forget about it. "Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Please go fuck yourself".
Luckily, Netflix has improved this a lot (which is why I happily pay for it), but for a lot of content, it is still impossible to consume in a legal way.
So person A lends some music to person B, person B copies it and returns the original to A. This scenario is legal. The nice thing is person A can be a library.
Now if person A makes a copy and gives it to person B, this is illegal, even if the end result is identical. Bits have color.
A small fee (taxation) in return for open access to literature, and in most cases music and film too.
brb downloading Windows Server 2019 Enterprise Datacenter iso torrents to put into production
Anecdotal, but atleast here in my poor country I'm less inconvenienced than when I was in Germany. I do sometimes feel guilty not being able to support the creators that make this content and often wish there was a way to donate, much more than I wish that the distributors covered my country - because they're shit.
The piracy world that torrents/hosts for free, in my experience, seem to do a far better job.
The socialist party (biggest left wing party at the time, and in power 2012-2016)here in France talked at lengtht about this idea during Sarkozy's implementation of the repressive Hadopi system.
Pay a yearly fee, don't get punished for pirating, money gets redistributed. Similar but also vastly different to how we already have a specific contribution for French state medias, and then one to finance French production (movies, music,...).
It didn't get past the heavy talk part because no matter how you turn it, the abuse / unfair redistribution / increasing need unrealistic compared to usage is unavoidable.
The smoking is notorious, for example. They cram in cigarettes wherever they can, often to the detriment of the scene.
I really wish there were laws mandating a very obvious " this scene was sponsored by X" overlay.
I have to say that it was a bit of an eye-opener- a lot of these ads are not obviously product-placement at all. The one that shocked me the most was an episode of "Friends from College" where the main characters went up the Napa valley for some wine tasting and then stopped into McDonalds on the way back- it was such a sharp, natural and realistic storyline that I would have never assumed that it was product placement. It dealt with "McDonalds-shame" in very sophisticated way that you wouldn't think McDonalds was capable of, and actually made me feel (as somebody who has been wine tasting in Napa and tries to avoid Mickey Ds) that a fast food burger is "allowed".
They may simply know their market well enough to know that people who tend to do McDonald’s take it as a “different kind of food”.
I'd want that too.
I'd love to get my hands on even one list of all product placements in a given show; it would be trivial to make a userscript that overlays such data over a Netflix stream, as an artistic project. I suspect there's a strong point to be driven there.
I don't think an in-vision in-scene notice should be required, as that is very intrusive to the viewer. However, I would support a requirement of full transparency, and I do believe they already notify people of product placement per episode (or am I thinking YouTube? I know I've seen recent notifications somewhere).
Alternately, I would support in-vision in-scene overlays if a subscriber could disable them. I can understand why it would be desirable to be enabled by default, but as an adult viewer who is quite capable of making my own purchasing decisions, I should have the right to consume media without that type of quasi-condescending warning invading my enjoyment of a given piece of media.
Is there anyone who isn’t susceptible to the psychological trickery in advertising?
I woulda once said something similar, but looking back as the years pass, I can see that was a delusion.
If you define influence to be whatever you want, of course you can say you are not influenced by ads.
Both to create awareness that you are being manipulated by this scene, and to discourage product placement in general.
[1] smoking mostly is self inflicted harm, GW kills others
Around my parts the white collar people tend to drive more than working class employees, because they get big houses away from the city where they work, and go to their cabins or whatnot every weekend, and are more likely to buy fuel-wasteful cars like SUVs. While non-white collar people more often go without a car at all or at least use it sparingly. Generally it's not like you couldn't choose a low carbon lifestyle if you worked in arts, blue collar industry, public sector jobs etc.
And about product placement in general: it seems to be a bigger buisness, than I suspected:
https://blog.hollywoodbranded.com/how-much-does-product-plac...
Is it too naive to hope that this pandemic will make us collectively question the value of creeds like growth for growth's sake?
The "growth for growth's sake" is a thought-stopping meme. Let's unpack why that's an inaccurate reason for why companies do what they do and also why people who don't even work at those companies also care about growth.
The commenter you responded mentioned Netflix and "growth". Remember that Netflix went public in 2002 with an IPO.
When any company sells shares of ownership to investors, they're making a deal with society that if you buy their stock, your money will "grow". For investors' shares to become more valuable, Netflix has to grow new revenue, grow new profits, grow new markets, grow new products, etc. Why do so many public investors (and the so-called "investors" includes your grandparents' pensions, teachers/firemen retirements, etc) care about their money "growing"?!? Because they want to protect their future purchasing power. (My previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15728480)
On other hand, if a family restaurant wants to just open one location with 20 tables and a payroll of 10 workers and just be a stable business that never grows, they wouldn't be able to sell public stock because nobody would buy it. There's nothing wrong with being a company that never grows -- but that's not the deal Netflix made with society.
So to rewrite your question a different way which gets at the root of where the motivation of "growth" comes from... Are we questioning the value of companies "going public"? Or are we questioning the ideology of fiat-money "inflation"? How do we make your grandparents pensions not care about "growth"?!? That's very difficult to solve!
There are also non-public entities that also want "growth". Countries like growth because it raises the standard-of-living for their citizens. Some small private businesses like some limited-scale growth because the owners like the challenges of running bigger business (e.g. expand to 5 restaurant locations instead of just 1.)
Even though the pandemic has shown the benefits of less smog in Los Angeles because of less economic activity, it still has not removed the root of human reasons for desiring "growth".
Not really. To riff on the old saying, "money doesn't grow on trees", we can also say "dividends don't grow on trees."
Where do dividends come from? From profits. But where do profits come from? In accounting lingo, we say profits come from "revenue minus costs" but to restate that in human action terms, we notice that profits come from Company X's purposeful activities that are desired by customers that choose to spend money with Company X instead of Company Y. Therefore, dividends are not guaranteed and in the hyper-competitive business sector Netflix operates, it requires growth to pay them.
If we mentally substitute "Blockbuster Inc" for "Netflix" in your dividend suggestion: "Can't shareholders just be happy with Blockbuster paying dividends instead of worrying about growth?"
... we'll see the "dividends instead of growth" won't work. In 2002, Blockbuster started losing money to upstart Netflix. If you look at Blockbusters historical stock prices[1], you'll see they started falling towards $0 because of repeated annual losses. Netflix was growing and Blockbuster was not. With accounting losses, Blockbuster has no profits and thus, no dividends to pay. Blockbuster eventually went bankrupt. Blockbuster did try to "grow" but it wasn't enough. No only do you have to grow as part of business strategy, you have to grow correctly with smart bets.
With Blockbuster as a case study, we can see that suggesting "Why can't Netflix shareholders be happy with dividends instead of growing?" -- will not work. Netflix's dividends/profits will evaporate if they don't grow to respond to Amazon Prime Video, HBO streaming, Disney streaming, Apple TV, etc. Yes, an "old-economy" business like railroads with little competition can pay dividends but Netflix is not that type of company. All the video streaming businesses are still furiously competing for consumers' discretionary entertainment budget. To not grow is to die because your customers leave for other more attractive video offerings.
E.g. in 2002, Netflix went public and had $272 million in revenue[2]. If Netflix adopted the "we don't believe in growth" and just simply collected the same $272 million every year until today, they would not have been able to offer $100 million to buy House of Cards in 2011. This means HBO or Amazon would have outbid them making Netflix less attractive for new memberships or existing members to renew. In 2011, Netflix could afford paying $100 million because 2010 revenue already exceeded $2 billion. Because they grew.
Ok, so let's say we hypothetically rule out expensive bidding wars to license content. You still need growth instead of a flatline revenue of $272 million for the next 18 years. Your employees want their salaries to grow with merit increases, bonuses, etc -- because their apartment rents, food costs, car insurance, etc go up. The existing content partners will want increased payments to license their shows when contract renewal comes up. The rent of office space leases, electricity, health insurance, etc all go up. Increasing salaries, license costs, fixed overhead costs, etc will subtract more and more from that "no-growth-just-the-same-$272 million-revenue-every-year". There will eventually be no profits left over to pay dividends.
In other words... the problem with a "no growth ideology" is that the world out there may not want to cooperate with you! They have their own agendas.
[1] https://external-preview.redd.it/Hfg1XQCVUlO2Og1_d9iSi0Ovekj...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#Membership_fee,_Blockb...
Many companies make money from activities that are not desired by customers.
Even if they stop getting new users, and just maintain their current user base, what is so bad about that? Nobody is going to go broke from that.
I wasn't suggesting that it was desirable for Netflix to show ads. I was replying specifically to the "growth for growth's sake" because it's misleading.
As for "Netflix can grow by getting more users by offering attractive services and features", that's circular reasoning. They need growth to help pay for new attractive services and features.
>Even if they stop getting new users, and just maintain their current user base,
The problem is that their none of their existing user base signed a 30-year irrevocable contract to always pay $11.99 for the next 360 months. Consumers have free will and their preferences change which is why Blockbuster couldn't count on their old customers to keep walking into their stores to rent DVDs.
In other words, the "just maintain their user base" doesn't mean anything because customers have their own agenda of how they make changes in spending discretionary entertainment dollars. E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?q=netflix+lost+subscribers
Growing is exactly what investors money is for, besides their monthly revenue that allows them to grow a bit every period of time X.
> The problem is that their none of their existing user base signed a 30-year irrevocable contract to always pay $11.99 for the next 360 months. Consumers have free will and their preferences change which is why Blockbuster couldn't count on their old customers to keep walking into their stores to rent DVDs.
That's a problem for when netflix loses users at a rate that will damage profit rates unacceptably, not before.
> E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?q=netflix+lost+subscribers
They lost market share because Disney+ has exclusive content Netflix doesn't and some users preferred to only maintain one service, there's nothing Netflix can do about it besides trying to make their product _more_ attractive, not less.
You could argue that maybe they could regain market share by making the product cheaper, but I doubt they will ever achieve a cheaper enough price where people would be willing to pay for both Netflix and Disney+/Other streaming website with more attractive content for them or switch back to netflix because it's become trash without an interesting catalogue and full of ads for being so cheap.
If you care about global poverty, disease, famine etc. then you care about growth.
Since we do not have levels of abundance which reach everyone even in rich societies, growth is everywhere a concern.
To "question its value" is to say: since I have sufficient wealth, that'll do for the planet.
I wish governments would set quality of life targets instead of gdp targets. If you need to grow gdp to get to a better quality of life, fine, but please, let’s all stop spreading the lie that gdp growth inevitably leads to increased quality of life, because often it causes the reverse.
I care about diseases being allowed to spread more than they should in the name of growth. This pandemic happened precisely because of greed and the “growth” fetish.
Poverty is skyrocketing now precisely because we didn't bother to stop to set up safeguards in our neverending lust for growth.
I care about our privacy being forcibly penetrated to sell data on our every eye saccade in the name of growth.
I care about every physical and virtual space being bombarded with advertisements during every waking moment in the name of growth.
I care about having every single aspect of human existence from water to companionship, being monetized and curated in the name of growth.
I care about IP franchises being milked to death and their corpses defiled and then their graves exhumed in the name of growth.
I care about the vast biomes being burned down and entire species going extinct in the name of growth.
I care about ethics and morals getting thrown under a steamroller in the name of growth.
In two years time when the death rate on C19 is reported at as-flu levels and the world is in a global depression with massive excess poverty, death, and abuse you'll be ranting then too -- just connecting these to "neoliberal conspiracies" as now.
Rather, this will be caused by precise the lack of concern for the economy.
The same could be easily said about your comments here, comparing "redistribution of wealth" to genocide.
‘Granularity’ is a big up-and-comer too.
These coded replies kill me and saying nothing would be more helpful.
At some point the price difference between the quality product and the cheap product becomes so vast that the quality product company must shrink either by reducing the quality of the product, or by reducing the manpower necessary to produce the quality product.
It's better to first introduce ads into the current subscription plan, and then introduce ad-free subscription levels at a higher price.
The moment you introduce ads to your service you invite a disease that will rot your service to the core.
The next step after ad-free subscription levels at a higher price is... ad-full subscription, because why leave money on the table, when you can get people to subscribe and then show them ads anyway (maybe different ads, maybe less of them, but still).
I suspect the problem is although everybody sees the ads the value comes from the wealthiest section of subscribers. These are the people most likely to pay to block the adverts. Lose those and you will lose your advertisers.
For low income households that can be quite a lot. Combine that with Netflix having significantly less content in Denmark than the rest of the world, and it might not be such a good deal the begin with after all.
So I guess it depends on where you live and your financial situation.
I canceled it because it was obvious their content is stretched out for no reason other than to waste my time. Also it’s full of product placement which takes me out of the story.
I won’t be surprised if they have more price tiers for different quality, or if the price tiers that already exist get wider. Kinda like the way the UK TV licence comes in normal and black & white.
https://www.hypable.com/how-i-met-your-mother-is-inserting-n...
I don't care near as much about keeping up with the zeitgeist as I used to. Maybe I'm just getting old.
People used to all watch the same shows at the same time.That made it the thing everyone had in common.
Now TV is more like reading books. Everyone does it n their own time. It's still a big things, but it doesn't create a nationwide community.
On top of this, you're also getting old :)
Weekly shows of certain types have massive speculation and plot discussion crowds with podcasts and analysis channels. Then there's a second viewership wave created by all the memes.
Netflix's just drop the whole season model has cost them a lot in public discussion and hence hype, some of their shows are now released in a weekly format to better capture the hype cycle.
This isn't the same thing.
In the 1990s, everybody watched The Simpsons. Even the people who hated it still watched it so they could complain about it. It was on broadcast TV so everybody had access to it. And Friends, and Cheers, and so on.
Game of Thrones is on HBO. If you have Netflix and not HBO, it's not there. Stranger Things is on Netflix. If you have HBO and not Netflix, it's not there. A lot more people watched Friends than Game of Thrones, because Game of Thrones was less available and had much more competition.
You can find a website full of fandom about Game of Thrones, but you can find a website full of fandom about Battlestar Galactica. Passion and popularity are not the same.
Popularity is what matters to the zeitgeist. It's not a matter of being able to find a place where all the Game of Thrones fans hang out and whinge about the last season, it's about being able to go into a room full of normies and make a reference to last night's episode and expect nearly everybody to get it. Which isn't really a thing anymore.
> Sunday's episode of "Game of Thrones" notched a series record of 17.8 million viewers, according to HBO. "The Long Night" broke the record set by the season premiere just two weeks ago when 17.4 million viewers tuned in.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/2...
> 106 million people watched ‘M.A.S.H.’ finale 35 years ago. No scripted show since has come close.
Note that these are raw numbers, not percentage of population. There are more people now than there were when "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" aired, but the broadcast TV episode still got more human beings to watch it.
Maybe almost 100 million watched Game of Thrones illegally.
The numbers don’t even compare. With Seinfeld that’s literally 1 in 5 people in the US. GoT is what, maybe 1 in 100?
No, it's so radically different that while there is still zeitgeist related to TV, it's not wrong to say the "tv zeitgeist" is dead.
Following a TV show used to be even more in the moment than following sports are today. Either someone saw last night's game, or they didn't and you can't have a meaningful conversation with them. They might catch up watching the highlight reel but conversations will be shallower, and talking about one game becomes near-irrelevant by the time the next game airs. These days TV shows have the zeitgeist pattern of a recent video game release. Everyone works through the release at different paces, conversations are bounded by seeing how caught-up everyone is before getting into details, and the material has long enough shelf life that conversations can happen with months - or years - between different conversation participants seeing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_shifting
Incidentally, the practice of time shifting is a reason VHS caught on and other home video formats didn't:
LaserDisc didn't offer time shifting at all, so it wasn't even in the running here; as a result, its pitch wasn't as compelling.
Betamax did, but its tapes only held one hour to begin with, which isn't enough for a sports game or a TV movie. It was only arguably of higher quality on the TVs of the era, and the fact its time shifting capability was half of what VHS could offer in the same time period made it a less attractive option.
(Both Betamax and VHS increased recording times as the format war wore on. However, after a certain point, merely being the entrenched winner has an impact on how the competition goes.)
I don’t think these other series you listed are anywhere close to the level GoT captured. They win awards and have big budgets and fans spread the word, but still nowhere near.
A lot of parents I know would not be at all comfortable allowing children under the age of 14 to watch this show (and for older kids only on a case-by-case basis) due to its incredibly violent & sexual content, horrific rapes depicted in detail, and extremely graphic sadism across the board.
Many adults wouldn't begin to consider watching it for these reasons. Sometimes I wish I hadn't.
Now, though? I don't care about "tha memes." I don't care if I'm current in my analogies. I want to take care of the people I care about, and experience things that enrich my life.
Other people can care about memes and such, and I don't think any less of them for it. Not that they need my validation. But my own world revolves around different suns now.
But it's very far from how things were, say 20 years ago.
An interesting question is what the zeitgeist is now? I have two potential answers:
1. Nothing. The worlds has diversified on the net, and most people focus on their own smaller interests.
2. In terms of what everyone is talking and thinking about, my best answer is, unfortunately, Donald J Trump.
Later disks like M-disc type DVDs and Blu-ray don't use living components and don't really age
Also remember organic != living. Organic is basically hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and carbon chains in molecules. They vary greatly in their durability and may or may not be useful to carbon-based life.
On the other hand, apparently there is a way for the YouTube creators to dictate where ad breaks will happen. I've seen at least two videos in which the person speaking said "and then YouTube will show you an ad right about... NOW"; lo and behold, an ad shows perfectly timed to when the speaker announces it.
I assume it's only going to get worse as TV ad revenue drops faster with more alternatives.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine - 21 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/brooklyn-nine-nine/seasons/7
The Office - 22 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/the-office/seasons/9
M.A.S.H - 24 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/m-a-s-h/seasons/10
Golden Girls - 24 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/the-golden-girls/seasons/1
Cheers - 24 mins https://trakt.tv/shows/cheers/seasons/10
Miami Vice (1984): 48m
Homicide Life On The Streets (1993): 47m
TekWar (1994): 45m
Nowhere Man (1995): 45m
Battlestar Galactica (2003): 44m
Dark Matter (2015): 43m
12 Monkeys (2015): 43m
Lucifer (2015): 43m
There are exceptions though. Legion (2017) episodes are around 50m, and several of the newer "made for streaming" shows have 50-60m episodes.
A-Team (1983): 49m
MacGyver (1985, original): 48m
Quantum Leap (1989): 47-48m
X-Files (1993): 43-44m
Monk (2002): 44m
Eureka (2006): 44m
MacGyver (2016, remake): 42-43m
HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question.
Frankly I think content is just overvalued and the actual creation of content is extremely inefficient, from a financial point of view. My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money.
It's honestly a terrible industry and needs to be disrupted. Market distortion is the only reason films cost what they do, from production to distribution and consumption. And literally everyone in the pipeline has an incentive to keep the market distorted, except people who watch content. Thank god for piracy.
Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money.
(My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)
It refers to the fact that a film as an enterprise is designed as an independent business with equity held by a few investors, and the enterprise gets dissolved when the film finishes post production. It's the only financial model that actually makes sense when you consider how a film is made and by whom. A small group of money people front a large amount of capital to pay hundreds to thousands of subcontractors up front to create an asset with intangible value, and they split the rights to that asset when they're done. Some of the subcontractors gets something that looks like equity, most don't.
It is a source of problems and inefficiencies. But to me the big issues lie before pre and after post, a lot of the work and structure of businesses during the creation of a film is pretty well honed and workers do have different kinds of power than most employees in traditional environments.
Also films are totally different than television and other media, at least financially. Studios work differently than networks.
A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.
What I mean by market distortion is really the lack of insight into value creation. How much value is created by whom in the pipeline, essentially. Data driven, direct to consumer enterprises are changing this a bit and that's great. But my experience is that data doesn't change minds of the top stakeholders, and there are incentives to make decisions that are bad for consumers even if the data says that both sides can win.
Netflix has no such network licensing problems.
Hulu was a joint venture between several networks. There are three old shows that still have commercials due to old contracts that were made before they switched to the new business model.
Given TV deals are complicated (for example, the networks likely have revenue deals with production companies), its not worth a huge renegotiation.
https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#s...
The additional shows you can get on demand without Hulu Live TV have ads. But that’s more akin to traditional cable.
- Grey’s Anatomy
- Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD
- How to Get Away with Murder
One nice thing about this is it makes plain how much the networks make from showing ads to your household. I happily pay a little extra to “outbid” the ad networks.
Hulu (No Ads)
Get First Month Free
then $11.99/month
A few excluded shows play with ads.
[from here https://signup.hulu.com/plans]
That last line kills me.
It's like H2G2, you can't have Tea and No Tea unless you remove your common sense particle.
Yeah, I guess that isn't as bad as it seems if there are just a few. I didn't bother to look up what "excluded" meant.
edit: Incredibly, there seem to be multiple reasons why you can see ads when on the "No Ads" plan; and they have an entire page dedicated to these reasons: https://help.hulu.com/s/article/ads-no-commercials?language=...
Then there is Hulu Live TV which is like traditional cable. That gives you shows live and on demand that would usually come with a cable package. This is in addition to the regular Hulu offering.
Because it says "A few excluded shows play with ads." And its three shows out many hundreds.
The worst step back to me from TV -> streaming -> streaming becoming more TV like is content release schedules. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus was a great example, you have all the episodes ready and there isn’t a good reason to keep them sitting behind a time gate. I would be much more likely to subscribe for a month to watch a show in a week than I would be to subscribe for a few months to few one show. Instead you get none of my money
(I hope. There hasn't been much of a market for privacy)
What do you mean? Is HBO or HBO Go adding commercials?
Side note, with all of the streaming subscriptions I have, I'm probably not saving any money compared to when I had traditional cable, but there are fewer commercials and the content is so much better.
Personally, I will not subscribe to services that show commercials. Commercials are for free services, not for paid services. As soon as you allow them to cross that boundary....
With that in mind I was wondering which Hulu plan was most popular. All I could find was the same widely syndicated Reuters article [1] from January 2019 calling the plan with ads "Hulu's most popular plan". I guess there is a market for streaming with ads.
1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hulu-prices/hulu-cuts-pri...
HBO built a business providing ad-free TV entertainment. The Economist built a business selling ad-free news periodicals. YouTube provides a paid ad-free option.
You could look at the Web and say “it’s littered with ads” or you could look at the Web and say “it’s the largest collection of free information on the planet.”
It's an "ad-free", with a large disclaimer under asterisk.
> you could look at the Web and say “it’s the largest collection of free information on the planet.”*
Or you could look at the way advertising influences curation of information, and how the viability of ad-based business models mean there's incentive to create sites with things that promise, but not deliver, information. You could look at that and say that the Internet is the largest collection of free disinformation on the planet. Most places that give reliable information do not show or involve themselves with advertising.
Ads have enabled me to access information at little to no cost to me. Ads enable us to search the Internet.
I learned to exercise, eat healthy, and much more from watching YouTube. I’ve learned a lot from newspapers and blogs. I’ve learned a lot from people on Twitter. Do I enjoy advertising? No, usually not. But from my perspective it’s a win-win. Companies promote their products and I get to read things for free.
Look on the bright side.
Imagine that when "Star Trek" was originally airing, the episodes could be 50 minutes long to allow for commercials in a 60 minute slot.
By the time Star Trek was in reruns in the 80's they were cutting a few minutes here and there to allow for the longer commercial time.
By the time the cable Sci-Fi (or was it Sy-Fy yet?) aired them "un cut" they had to put them into a 90 minute slot.
Sometime before the latter example, I ended up cutting the cord: stopped paying for television. You have to decide where the line is for you and act.
Back around 1981, advertisers would take a certain percentage of ad pages in each newspaper or magazine and consider it a reasonable deal. These days, they absolutely will not accept this unless they get a lot more space, obnoxious animations, force-play videos, and overlays that you have to click through, and often various registration walls, cross-site tracking, etc.
They have only themselves to blame for ad blocking. With ML, eventually this will become pervasive, even into the physical world. (My VR goggles will gray out billboards, etc.)
iOS: adblockers are natively supported through "content blockers", plus there's a plethora of adblock browsers
Whatever it takes to maintain control.
Most of the websites I produce do not have ads on them. I don't make much money, but I do make some and it's better than it used to be. I'm hopeful that there will be more of a trend towards small content producers making enough to survive and we can begin to crowd out the "cancer" that is some of the worst commercialized stuff.
It doesn't have to go away completely. We can just refuse to let it choke everything.
https://github.com/bromite/bromite/wiki/Installing-SystemWeb...
I think it'll be the exact opposite. I think the Black Mirror episodes are closer to what will be in our (not too distant) future. The content will track your gaze, and if you are not looking at the ad, then measures will be taken to get your attention back to where "it should be".
Please drink verification can.
Wasn't there one that just paused the video, and would not continue until you watched the ad? The advertisers have to crawl before they can run. But if they had their way, loud noises would not be beyond their acceptable measures. I mean, they did spend all of that money producing the ad, so the least you can do is watch it.
No, neo-Luddites will. If they aren't successful later generations will eventually forget how it was to not have coercive ads, so they won't have the same visceral response to the indignities they cause. Sort of like what happened with the market system.
Only if the billboard doesn't qualify for "acceptable billboard ads" (or you could jailbreak and run a different billboard blocker like a rebel)
Will your glasses grey out James Bond's Aston Martin in Goldfinger?
What ever happened to gold like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcWPusAmaWI
Billboards are heavily regulated and sparse in New Zealand. It can be stopped, but it takes willpower and hard work.
So maybe it’s more like “Netflix with special offers”
>“We won't break programming at awkward times,'' promises Dick Cox, president of CBS Cable,
It's interesting how a generation raised in war (WWII, Vietnam) was very sensitive to propaganda and how it influenced their children. Whereas today, propaganda is spread on TV networks, the internet, and other news sources and yet very few people stop and ask what the intent of the source of information is.
But let's face it: The stupidity of the public seems to have no bottom. Look what Apple gets away with.