Zoom adding advertisements to the free tier of its service

What you see over time is that as products mature, they add advertising and then saturate it. The reason is filling your product with ads kills retention, so you can’t do this early on.

The interesting part to this is that once the competition is heavily saturated with ads, having no ads gives you a distinctive edge over them.

The thing that interests me the most is how ads can significantly degrade the quality of the product itself. This is really apparent with Amazon, where their ad platform not only pushed up the visibility of very low quality products but also made their seller ecosystem dependent on them. Amazon’s search results are their content, which are now ads. In order to outbid competitors, you need to increase your margins, which you do by selling a shittier product. I suspect we will see a similar thing happen to Apple’s App Store over time.

> At least on my services, they are just short trailers, never annoying ads like Progressive's. And if I'm not interested, there's always a Skip button. I'm paying for this service, I want to know what upcoming shows are coming. I don't mind if this helps with their internal metrics.

Amazon Prime paid channel subscriptions don't let you skip the previews for that channel. (At least, that is true for Paramount+.)

They're also experimenting with a free tier:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/21/netflix-introduces-...

I remember when we got a fancy TV with a…wired…remote.

It was amazing.

Of course the wire was about 2 feet too short. So it was still my job to sit on the floor and in the middle of the room to be the “wireless” portion of the remote. But still, was so much better than having to walk up every 5 minutes (my dad loved making me flip channels during commercials, even though often commercials were often synced between abc, nbc, and cbs). But then came PBS

I remember reading that article!

The first phrase in that article says "Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption" which 100% supports my position. The original "cable TV" was to get all the broadcast channels near by in perfect quality without an antenna, thus having ads. There were ads on "cable TV" from the beginning , many consumers just assumed it wasn't there. It also acknowledges the rest of my point in stating "Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure from commercial interests, is attracting some attention as a potential vehicle for advertising." Note that essentially some channels were paid extras which did not originally have ads, while other channels like CNN, USA, and RCTV did have ads from the get go.

And yeah, advertising revenues weren't nearly as huge for cable networks at the beginning. The first cable networks started operations in the 50s, and you're sharing an article written in '81 pretty much showcasing that there were only a few cable-only TV stations at the time. At the beginning there were zero cable-only TV stations, and that was how it was for about 30 years. All channels you got on cable were just the broadcast stations. Many years later they started adding cable-only stations with some of those stations having advertising and some of them without.

The first real cable-only TV channel was HBO, which was without ads. The second real cable-only TV station was WTBS, which had ads (it was a nearly nation-wide rebroadcast of Ted Turner's broadcast TV station, so only semi-only-cable?) and started on cable in 1976. After that there was Christian Broadcasting Network which was ad-free. In 1979 we got Nickeloden and ESPN (ads), in 1980 we got CNN and USA (ads).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2020/11/02/the-rise-...

It's a mix. As a premium spotify customer, I still see spotify-injected (skippable) ads.

native ads - kind of sums up the ludicrousness of the adtech industry… “they are not real ads because they are NATIVE!”

They are, and I think that Spotify should work to ban them. If I'm listening to a podcast on Spotify, then presumably the podcast creator is already getting my money (indirectly, via Spotify) and therefore I should get an ad-free version.

It's also known that the extensions are also bought and start displaying ads, or worse, double charge the ad industry to let them escape their block (like once upon a time ABP did).

It's a great solution, but it has a big limitation: you can't use it with the official YouTube apps for phones and TV's. You end up having to resort to 'hacked'/third-party clients like Vanced, with all the risks to your Google account that entails.

Doesn't work on a phone or Chromecast, unfortunately.

consumer routers are not the main problem with that (they might even support multicast, because various ISPs use it to distribute TV channels) - the public internet generally has no way of handling it.

WebRTC can support it all they want, but to a first approximation, Multicast doesn't work over the open internet, so it won't help outside of corporate videoconference (which generally runs OK, because corporate networks are mostly wired and often overprovisioned or easier to provision than homes)

Hmm. If you trust users to discern between malicious and non-malicious emails (that can contain things like "the mandatory new tool to fight malware" as you say), I think that implies you trust users to discern between malicious ads and non-malicious ads.

And I don't see any reason that the spam/malicious-content filtering tools used to filter email would not be used to filter ads (with appropriate modifications of course).

So this leaves me unconvinced that Zoom web ads are any more susceptible to being malware vectors as compared to ads anywhere else (or other tools that host user-generated/third party text, like email, messaging, and social media).

The linked article talks about misleading ads that let people download malicious apks. This is no different than scam emails with malicious .exes, or "please reset your WhatsApp password here" messages, ...etc. In other words, it doesn't demonstrate why web ads are any more susceptible to being malware vectors when compared to email, messaging apps, or social media (basically anything with user-generated/third-party content that allows text).

Which is why it feels unfair to me to single out Zoom's addition of ads to their free tier for being a malware vector.

I don't believe anyone is a casual user of video chat anymore. It's like calling someone a casual telephone user or a casual car user. It's fundamental to daily life.

Does Google record video or audio or keep transcriptions or anything of what's said? I've always felt like a differentiating factor is privacy, not just comparing free / easy / quality etc.

Watching this rule come into force has been weird and enlightening in many ways. For one, this rule caused a lot of friction as many banks and payment processing systems weren’t ready for it by the time it came into force. This despite it being announced over two years before it came into effect and a 6-month extension on the enforcement date! Also, while I personally like the new rules and support them wholeheartedly, there’s been significant opposition to them because they make it more onerous for businesses to set up subscriptions, an already rare and difficult business model in India. Personally, if your business mode counts on people so passively continuing to subscribe that they can’t re-authenticate every payment cycle (and that too only if it’s a significant amount per month!) I think you you should rethink what you do, but what do I know?

When you can't establish a direct connection (potentially with the help of STUN), you need to use TURN, which uses a server as a relay, so it's not really P2P any more (although a TURN server does less work than an SFU, so you can scale it up more cheaply).

> You do get worse latency though, right? Which I believe to be important for conversation quality, even when users don’t actively realize that latency is to blame.

Latency in voice communication is super important, yes.

P2P latency can be better or worse than P2S2P latency. It depends on the networks the peers and server are on, where all parties are located, and how they're interconnected.

If the peers are on the same ISP, P2P is probably better, if they're not, it can vary widely. Sometimes those ISP will exchange packets directly, but far away, whereas they both may have more direct routes to a nearby server. If the peers are far away, the server network may have better long distance transit than the peer ISPs. Of course, sometimes the server is far away from both the peers. For some participants, p2p brings problems because it exposes each peer's IP to the other peers.

A well designed system will measure and adjust the routing for the best results, including during the call (and carefully adjust the buffering to avoid large jitter) as conditions can change.

You might be surprised how little of the "sticker bandwidth" on a residential connection you can actually use when you are sending UDP at a highish packet rate, perhaps to an international destination, and need low loss+latency+jitter.

The average experience of users would go down significantly as you start to multiply the bandwidth requirements, which is why P2P isn't typically used for more than 2 participants despite the potential bandwidth savings to the operator.

And unlike Google Meet or MS Teams, it doesn't cause my Macbook's fans to spin into orbit.

Agreed; I also teach virtually, across a number of platforms, and Zoom is the one that just works easily and intuitively for everyone. Screen sharing and breakout rooms are a pain in all the other tools I've tried.

It's not my favourite piece of software, but for virtual teaching, it is head-and-shoulders above the competition.

I also taught on zoom -when I had connection issues I had no idea how to reconnect to a dropped call. Meanwhile students where thrown out of the call when I took to long.

Compared to google meet it all felt like a bad joke.

Agree, recently changed jobs and went from Zoom to Teams and it's a complete dumpster fire. Never had a single issue with Zoom.