Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

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> The future is definitely being able to stream all the shows and movies immediately after release anywhere on the web.

I agree, I wonder though if future Hollywood will be more or less profitable.

Imagine a future where all movies/tv shows were given away for free/stolen, how would they profit?

I think the answer is advertising inside the movie/show. I recently saw this done pretty tastefully in an episode of 'Workaholics' where the group wove some product placement into the story pretty naturally. I was day dreaming about how far they could take this and imagined them freezing the scene and the three of them breaking character/fourth wall to pitch a product and then unfreezing the scene and going back to acting. You could imagine this getting so popular that it eventually becomes annoying and then eventually edited out of any shows/movies.

What I think is even more interesting is the fact that advertising, such a wildly inefficient method, right now props up so many industries.

Imagine if Google released a product tomorrow that was 100% efficient at replacing advertising.. Some sort of beam that just got people to understand/like your product immediately. What would all of these major industries do for revenue?

> What I think is even more interesting is the fact that advertising, such a wildly inefficient method, right now props up so many industries.

What makes you think advertising is inefficient? For specific parties it's extremely efficient. It gives the advertiser the power to change the viewer's preference between Brand X and Brand Y. Allowing himself to be convinced to buy Brand X in exchange for content allows the viewer to pay for the content with money out of Brand Y's pocket instead of his own. In many cases this brings more profit to the content provider than that customer would be willing to pay directly out of pocket. The detriment goes almost entirely to the competing brand who loses a sale to the advertiser.

Which is really the trouble for advertisers. Advertising is an arms race. Brand X buys advertising and takes market share from Brand Y, so Brand Y buys advertising to take it back. Repeat until advertising expenses consume a significant portion of the margins for every brand, in all industries across the entire world economy. Kind of a nice business to be in, isn't it? Start an economic war and force all sides to bid against each other to buy your weapons.

> Imagine if Google released a product tomorrow that was 100% efficient at replacing advertising.. Some sort of beam that just got people to understand/like your product immediately. What would all of these major industries do for revenue?

Use the beam to make people like their products enough to pay money for them?

A viewer's time is worth more to the advertiser than to the viewer, and the content provider profits more from arranging that transaction than selling the content directly for money. Content providers could still sell content for money if advertising somehow disappeared, but they would be significantly less profitable because they would lose their ability to arbitrage the time-for-money transaction between the advertiser and the viewer.

That's a load of horseshit. I've been seeing ads for things I will never, ever buy forever and apparently Hulu thinks they're going to change that. The advertisers are wasting both their money and my time. I do not gamble and I do not drink. Ain't no amount of playing the same damn ad every break in Hulu that isn't going to make me not hate your company.

That's just statistics. Some percentage of customers who view an ad -- generally a very large percentage -- will never be swayed by it. But they don't have to be. You don't have to convince very many customers to buy your car instead of the next guy's car, or to switch to your brand of shampoo for the rest of their lives, and you're ahead. Even if 95% of the other people you've paid to put ads in front of never give you a penny.

> I do not gamble and I do not drink. Ain't no amount of playing the same damn ad...

so if you were chatting with a friend, and the topic of drinking or gambling came up, wouldn't this ad turn up as part of the conversation? wouldn't the image of the company/brand be on your mind, and so you'd speak about it? Even if you don't personally transact with the company, branding is hugely important to these companies that mainly produce a commodity, but differentiate using branding. Classic example is nike, or fashion labels.

If the advertisers desire me to shower their clients and products with profanity when they come up in conversation, then... touche they got me.

> I was day dreaming about how far they could take this and imagined them freezing the scene and the three of them breaking character/fourth wall to pitch a product and then unfreezing the scene and going back to acting. You could imagine this getting so popular that it eventually becomes annoying and then eventually edited out of any shows/movies.

This has been around for a while: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/LiveA...

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