Viacom pulls “The Daily Show” offline as a result of contract dispute
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
(My bank started doing the "double dip" thing too. Every item in my Bank of America statement now contains a "relevant" ad. I don't know why this bothers me, but it does. I already pay transaction fees and interest. Must you also try to show me irrelevant ads?)
So then it's not 50%. It's 0%. "Hear that, HBO? Our programming has no ads at all!"
10/30 is not 50%. That's just completely broken math, and the people trying to justify the claim sound ridiculous.
If the ads are not part of the programming, then there are 0 minutes of programming that are ads, and so 0/20 minutes of programming are ads, or 0% of the programming time is ads.
On the other hand, if you consider ads part of the programming, then there are 10/30 minutes of programming that are ads, so about 33%. (It actually closer to 8/30, but whatever.)
In no sane mathematical world does 10/30=50%. You're changing the definition of "programming" in the middle of your math, which doesn't work. You could say that the ads are "50% AS LONG as the program time", but this is different from your claim, and it's still much less clear than simply saying program to ads ratio is 2:1.
I have the word "time" after program, and the word "time" after ad.
You and the others attacking jrockway are being deliberately obtuse when it was clear what he meant. Granted, he didn't express the "claim" as accurately as one would need if programming or writing a formula on a board. But hyperbole such as "in no sane mathematical world" falls flat if you can't quote accurately yourself.
The formula you just tried to rebut was time a = 10 mins, time b = 20 mins, making a = b * .5 --quite sane.
Second, your original comment ("ads are not programming, but are as long as 50% of the programming") was correct (to the extent that the 10/30 claim is correct). My comment was not intended to say that your comment was incorrect, but that it does not change the incorrectness of jrockway's statement.
And no, it was not clear what jrockway meant. My first thought when I read that was "what the hell?". Clearly others were also confused. Attempting to justify the claim as somehow technically correct at best misguided. The simple fact is that the statement as he worded it is incorrect and (even with the twisted interpretation) misleading. As someone else pointed out, having 15 minutes of commercials does not mean that 100% of the program is commercials. This is a misleading claim, regardless of whether you can produce a convoluted interpretation to support it.
If jrockway had simply said "I spoke poorly", then I'd have much less of an issue with it. The fact that he tried to support it by heaping on with "It's one third of the total, but it's one half when added to the original." makes me think he either doesn't understand why this is incorrect (non-native speaker?), or he's intentionally pushing a misleading claim.
> The formula you just tried to rebut was time a = 10 mins, time b = 20 mins, making a = b .5 --quite sane.*
15 minutes = 15 minutes * 1, therefore 100% of the program time is commercial time. Quite sane. Or how about: You have $100 in the bank. I have $100 in my pocket. Therefore I have 100% of your money in my pocket.
I don't believe that you're actually incapable of seeing the problems with these statements, and how they are incorrect with a standard English interpretation.
The fact that you can write a formula that looks correct out of context doesn't make the claim correct. It just means your math doesn't reflect the claim accurately.
10 commercial minutes
--------------------- = ?
20 program minutesFor every two minutes of content, you pay by watching a minute of ads. Whether you call 1 minute 50% of two minutes, or call it 33% of 3 minutes, doesn't matter to his point.
However long you enjoy actual content of the show itself, you spend half again that long watching ads, and when you watch via cable, you pay for the bundle including the fee for that channel.
Then why on earth are you trying to defend the inaccurate claim?
I'd actually say it matters a great deal, because there's a huge difference between 50% and 33% (aka a 2:1 ratio and a 1:1 ratio). Especially since it's not even 2:1 in reality. It's about 2.75:1. So it's inaccuracy piled on top of exaggeration.
I don't recall saying it was a 1:1 ratio. As I recall, jrockway specified 20 minutes content, 10 minutes ads. It's plausible to call ten fifty percent of twenty, leading to his unfortunate grammar vs math, but that wasn't his point.
Btw, per Wikipedia, "a typical 30-minute block of time now includes 22 minutes of programming and eight minutes of advertisements", making it quite clear as I also used the terms, that "programming" is not "ads".
Using the wiki terminology, that's a 30 minute block of time, 22 minutes of programming, 8 minutes of ads. So, contrary to your assertion a couple comments up, programming and ads and time were the correct words, and my application of the word "time" was appropriate and accurate.
As it happens, this topic was of interest to me as I've researched ad load periodically for my work in online video delivery.
A few years ago, reality programming had 17 to 18 minutes of content and 12 - 13 minutes of advertisements, while scripted shows were consistently 22 minutes of content with 8 minutes of ads. Depending on your sampling of shows, 2:1 (20 to 10) is a reasonable average. To be fair, total ad content has gone back down a bit since.
However, it's still getting worse if you include sponsored content in the shows themselves. This link:
http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/average-hour-long-...
shows that of late night talk shows in 2009, "the combined load of brand appearances and network ad messages in these late night shows is 29m34s per hour, or 49% of total content time."
There's your 1:1 ratio! In any case, whether 33% or 49%, or "36% of an average prime-time hour", as reported above, saying that +/- 2 mins of ads undermines jrockway's double dipping claim is like an airline stewardess pushing your seat that last quarter inch forward as if it made the difference between life and death (with apologies to Seinfeld).
There are simply too many damn ads to be paying again for the privilege of being advertised to. That's why I no longer subscribe to cable (that, and half the cable bill being the particular genre of reality show called "sports", which isn't of interest to me). I spend my dollars à la carte.
TL;DR:
This link offers measured commercial time per television hour:
http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/average-hour-long-...
It says late night talk shows may have advertising "49% of total content time", while commercials are "36% of an average prime-time hour".
Right, but that's implied when someone says commercials are 50% of the programming: 1:1 ads to non-ads.
I did mistype that originally, though. I wrote "50% and 33% (aka a 2:1 ratio and a 1:1 ratio)". It should have been "50% and 33% (aka a 1:1 ratio and a 2:1 ratio)".
> As I recall, jrockway specified 20 minutes content, 10 minutes ads. It's plausible to call ten fifty percent of twenty, leading to his unfortunate grammar vs math, but that wasn't his point.
That's plausible if the context makes it clear, but it was extremely unclear in this context.
> Btw, per Wikipedia, "a typical 30-minute block of time now includes 22 minutes of programming and eight minutes of advertisements", making it quite clear as I also used the terms, that "programming" is not "ads".
Uh, how does a quote from Wikipedia make it clear what you were saying? Were we discussing a random Wikipedia page and I missed that?
> Using the wiki terminology, that's a 30 minute block of time, 22 minutes of programming, 8 minutes of ads. So, contrary to your assertion a couple comments up, programming and ads and time were the correct words, and my application of the word "time" was appropriate and accurate.
No, your application was not appropriate or accurate. Your statement's structure still implies that ads are a portion of the programming. "X is Y% of Z" implies that Z is a superset of X.
Your comment("Yet 10 mins of ads to every 20 mins of programming makes ad time exactly 50% of the program time.") says that ad time is 50% of the program time.
> saying that +/- 2 mins of ads undermines jrockway's double dipping claim
Right, but I didn't say that. I said that it was an exaggeration compounded with the misleading "50%" claim. That you're now trotting out other statistics to try to support the misstatement is irrelevant, because jrockway himself said it was 10 mins ads and 20 mins programming. He clearly wasn't talking about product placement.
I also find it strange that you're still pushing 20 to 10 as a "reasonable average" when your own reference (Wikipedia) says it's 22 to 8. Your 17-18 to 12-13 seems to be original research.
> It says late night talk shows may have advertising "49% of total content time", while commercials are "36% of an average prime-time hour".
No. That's a selective reading (and a little bit of bias pushed by the article). It says that "commercial messages" are 36% of an average prime-time hour. They included "in-show brand appearances", aka product placements, in this. As in "I can see a brand on-screen". They actually said there were about 14 minutes of "network commercial messages", or 23%; not 50%, and not even 33%. For late night, it was 26% "network commercial messages".
And 23/7, 22/8, 20/10, 18/12, 17/13... There are shows with all these ratios.
I'm not complaining about DirectTV charging customers, I'm complaining about Viacom charging DirectTV. If anything, DirectTV should be charging Viacom!
But isn't it that DirectTV, cable companies, etc. have expensive infrastructure that is completely worthless without content to put through it? Whereas networks can always go somewhere else, find other ways to deliver their content? It would seem to me that DirectTV is more dependent on Viacom than the other way around - thus comes the direction of money flow.
Viacom needs the largest audience possible to maximize ad revenue. It simply won't be able to make any content without the viewership. Viacom should be paying DirectTV for building the infrastructure to enable them to have larger viewership, enabling Viacom to have increased ad revenue.
In other words, if I own a thousand content websites and monetize them by running my own ad network across them, it would be non-sensical for Google to pay me to use my websites in their index, even though Google would be useless without being able to link to websites.
As to satiate TV, they can still do regional advertising if they have multiple satiables just not 'local'. Which actually hurts because 'local' company's have little interest in advertising to the entire east coast.
I'm long since past the point where the words "Great comment explaining this on Reddit" will get me to automatically click something.
"... sports channels account for about 40 percent of cable fees..." and you're paying Fox News too whether you watch their ads or not -- http://allthingsd.com/20100308/hate-paying-for-cable-heres-t...
Looks like that got auto-corrected. Sorry.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/07/13/battle-roy...
>"They don't want the promise to get paid on Tuesday for an episode shot today."
I'm not sure I agree with that. I mean, I agree that's the way it currently works, but not that it couldn't work elsewise: with the show being fully produced, then sold. That's how both music and movies work, as well as the physical manufacture of any product. So I'm not convinced that it's not a viable model for television shows, or out-of-the-ordinary in any way.
And there's why the sat company pays the content provider.
https://www.cardpartner.com/affinity/app/fsf
:P
Is that a typo? Or hyperbole? Isn't ten minutes of advertising for every twenty minutes of programming what we call "33 percent advertising"?
Sometimes statistics lie, but more often they tell the truth in a fashion similar to a math test where every problem is designed to trick you.
If you see three birds and four squirrels in your backyard, are the birds 75% of the squirrels? (Are the squirrels 133% of the birds?)
But it doesn't do much to sit outside the negotiations and decide that you are offended by how the deal shakes out. Which way the money flows depends on the relative bargaining positions of the two parties. Yes, DirecTV is providing Viacom with a service -- operating the satellites and dealing with individual consumers and billing them. But Viacom is also providing DirecTV with a service: producing TV programs and channels (including Comedy Central) that consumers want to watch and are the reason they subscribe to DirecTV in the first place!
We are ready for ala carte channel pricing or maybe metered pricing, thing is they know that 80% or more of their content is crap. Channel volume has been their big selling point. The true irony here is this is Viacom, dozens of crap networks all buoyed by literally, maybe, three shows...
I haven't paid much attention for a while but dish and dtv also nickle and dime for locals, hd vs sd, the number of TVs etc. all while broadcasting maybe a dozen home shopping networks and who knows how many that have more than 8 hours of paid programming a day.
Its your choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Development_histor...
I read a lot of golden and silver age science fiction. One of the things I love about the oldies isn't that they're necessarily better than modern science fiction, it's that they're short. Creatures of Light and Darkness, a fantastic book, is 192 pages. It's a stand-alone story which spans thousands of years, the better part of the universe, and builds such wonderful characters. And the author gets you from here to there in 192 pages.
Nowadays, you can't introduce a plot and two characters in 200 pages. 400, 500, 600 pages are the norm. Some of it is style. Sometimes you need 600 pages to tell a story. But a portion of it is that authors are told, by their publishing companies, they need to target a certain size to get their books published, because a book needs to have a certain heft or it will never leave the shelf. And it's a damn shame, because some of these 600 page monstrosities could have been a fantastic 200 page book.
Broadcast television also imposes certain constraints upon the show. Some shows work well with this format, for instance, if the show is episodic in nature. If the show is trying to tell a particular story, it works less well.
One thing that can go wrong is that not all stories that get turned into a TV show require 18 hours of video to tell. A lot of filler is added, episodic episodes which get dropped into the middle of the story arc to drag things out. If the show's producers and writers are good, they can use these filler episodes to flesh out the characters and the world. But they aren't always good enough.
A second thing that can go wrong is that you don't always know when to end your story. A show may get renewed for two or three or four seasons, and if you finished telling the story in the first season, you now have to come up with a completely new story for season two, or reveal that by a fiendish twist your story wasn't actually finished in the season finale like you thought it was. This isn't always as ... satisfying as it could be. Other times, you have to keep putting off finishing the story at the end of each season, which turns entire seasons into filler. This carries the additional risk that you may get canceled in season three and never finish the story you started in season one.
I'm generally looking forward to the death of big media producers, because I think the quality of entertainment will go up once people are freed from the constraint of telling all of their stories in twenty to twenty-four 22 or 44 minute episodes.
But I don't think the death of the big media producers has anything to do with that one way or the other.
The markets for that kind of thing aren't the same markets the big media folks, so the new markets can grow regardless of the old ones. Kickstarter and the like are the likely funding venues, online is the likely distribution mechanism.
Toes are being dipped. Jane Espenson just funded a season of her webseries on Kickstarter. Dan Harmon and Charlie Kaufman just launched a kickstarter for a $200,000 art film project yesterday. Those are some names who have enough clout to get things done otherwise. But maybe not enough to get the things they want done most (almost no one has that kinda clout). Kickstarter helps them get some of what they want.
Don't count on the big media producers dying out, by the way. They're smart, they're connected, and they are survivors. They've been through more startup like situations than almost anyone in silicon valley, and they're the ones that lived through it. Don't underestimate them. TV and movies won't be like the music business. They saw it, and they learned the lessons, even if you don't think they did.
The only question is whether there's still a lot of money to be made from advertisers or subscribers if you end up with a good show. And I think the answer is clearly yes.
So the incentive to invest will remain as strong as ever, so we can expect a commensurate amount of capital to get invested. The deals will just get structured differently.
When you have a market (and in this case its Television) there is an 'eco system' which develops to support that market. So for television you get producers, production companies, set dressers, directors, writers, actors, distributors, advertisers, and about a zillion other various bits. They all live and die in the 'value chain' which is the fundamental product being delivered to and then consumed by its customers.
Now disruption comes in two flavors, you can disrupt the eco-system and you can disrupt the product. If you disrupt the product, the product dies, the eco system tries with varying levels of success to adapt to adjacent markets. If you disrupt the eco system, parts of the eco system die and other parts replace it.
But lets use an actual example for a minute. I was recently in Maine at the Maritime Museum there and they chronicle the rise and fall of the Maine sailing ship business which peaked in the 1860's and then was demolished by the the switch from wood hulled to steel hulled and sail powered to steam powered ships after the American Civil War. At no time was the world ever at risk of not being able to get 'quality ships' but the kind of ships people bought, and how they were made, changed dramatically between the 19th and 20th centuries. Granted that buying a 'tall ship' has becomes something of a challenge since they aren't generally built these days, buying a 'ship' is pretty straightforward.
So back to your comment about losing 'expensive and well written shows.' I do not believe that this disruption has changed the desire for quality, episodic entertainment. Rather it is changing the eco-system around how it gets made. You start getting people like NetFlix buying TV shows rather than television networks, or Kickstarter type funding drives.
The eco system is changing on content. But I don't think we'll lose quality in the process.
Very strange.
I would much prefer, for instance, just watching a five-minute short film / ad at the beginning and then getting to watch the whole show.
So you want everything you want, when you want it, for free? I'll buy you a train ticket to reality so you can join the rest of us.
I actually pay for Netflix. It's a great, simple experience. I paid for Hulu Plus too for a month, and found the commercials unbearable (especially since, on my connection, it would stop to buffer whenever it went to commercial or back).
I'm not averse to paying. I'm averse to not having an option to pay, and having to resort to commercials.
Usually I'm totally neutral about these sorts of spats, but Viacom crossed a line here. In the grand scheme of things, this is nothing to pull the pitchforks out over, but my opinion of Viacom is now far worse than it was before hearing about this and this issue wouldn't even otherwise impact me since I don't watch The Daily Show on the net and don't subscribe to DirecTV.
Bad PR move, Viacom. You should probably consider firing someone over this because whoever made this call is not good at their job.
One of DirecTV's core claims has been that online streaming of TV content undermines the value proposition of for-pay television [1]. I get that having your most vocal, most internetty users channel their anger toward your opposition is a powerful negotiation tactic, but this seems like it has a strong potential to backfire against Viacom.
[1] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/directv-via...
It's still on all the same torrent sites it's always been on. And that's the way anyone outside of the US and Canada has been forced to acquire the Daily Show for years.
Copyright is so quaint.
Thats the blindest, most ambitious goal you could possibly have with the internet. Lets all get serious for a sec: http://thepiratebay.se/search/the%20daily%20show/0/7/0
And besides, the Viacom streaming player is terrible and low quality. If anything, this is going to remind people of the Hi-def, no-ad world they could be living in.
On the other hand, that also increases costs for Viacom and it doesn't support the overall stable of shoes.
Guess what options i'm left with now.
What I find depressing is that watching other people have lives is supposed to be interesting but trying to have a life yourself is "very boring"; I'm boring because I'm poor, socially inept and don't have time for leisure activities - not because I don't watch broadcast TV.