PVRs and Advertisers' Worries 519
Jurisenpai writes "Today's NYT has an article on the conflicts between PVRs and advertisers, mentioning the recent Sonicblue case, as well as Tivo and ReplayTV."
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PVRs and Advertisers' Worries
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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Gee, and I thought that paying for cable in the first place was meant to eliminate the need for commercial spots.
Most likely solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Make ads work with PVR (Score:4, Interesting)
or make them in slow-mo
Article Appears on the Front Page of Print NYT (Score:5, Interesting)
PVRs are here to stay (Score:5, Interesting)
1)There is no contract, explicit or implicit, between the transmitter and the receiver of radio waves. This is clearly laid out on the basis of CB, AM, FM, and TV laws for years. Though satellite and cable do in fact have an explicit contract between the people on opposite ends of the beam or wire, this is *NOT* between the original transmitters and the final receivers. This is an important point of FCC rulings.
2)The satellite and cable companies all stand behind PVRs as value-added features they can give their users. This puts the whole discussion into a legal battle between behemoth companies, not a napster-like fight between david and goliath.
3)Many of the companies who could lose from PVRs also could gain: Sony of course owns CBS, and while they lose money on ad revenue, the gain from the sale of PVRs. Same with Philips.
4)No matter how hard they try, reason generally does win out, and it's hard to imagine people ever being convinced that not watching ads is stealing - in which case refrigerators and toilets have been stealing for years.
The problem TV faces (Score:3, Interesting)
But how to make money off of syndication? When a show is in reruns the local station, or cable network, makes money by selling advertising. But if the ads are embedded in the show, how will the station make any money? Remembering that, without money they don't show the show. Will the backgrounds of the shots have to be digitally altered to sell new advertising? Or the foreground? Will we see Willow using a Mac on the first run, and a Dell in the rerun?
NPR model (Score:3, Interesting)
Note that this is the model that CNBC [msn.com] is using with "Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser", and it seems to be working very well for them.
John
This is the heart of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
That's right. One-third of network television's airtime is dedicated to advertising. And they're wondering why people are getting fed-up with commercials. It seems to be a rising trend [media-awareness.ca] as well.
I used to tape the Tick on Fox back when it was first run. The earlier seasons had approximately one more minute of programming than later seasons.
Stop bombarding us already!
Re:Difference between banner ads and TV ads (Score:1, Interesting)
It seems PBS is the only truly sustainable TV business model: people pay if they like the show. There must come a point when Pepsi realizes it's not worth $10 million to have Britney sing about pepsi on a beach.
Simple Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
* Ads that are *INTERESTING*. I watch those on my TiVo. I skip the boring ones.
* A *VARIETY* of ads. Even I get bored watching the same ad the upteenth time in half an hour. Penalties for those who show the exact same ad twice in one commercial break.
* Pay-Per-Show. Let people buy shows without ads. Problem solved. If I want to watch x with ads, then make it so I have to watch the ads. If I don't want to watch it with ads, I'll buy it.
TiVo, ReplayTV, etc are not the problem. It's the archaic business model. If you require ads to be seen in this technological age, and lots of people have the technology to skip it, well, it's time to rethink the way you do business. Make people pay for shows is one solution. The shows I watch tend to get cancelled all the time (the only TV show I watch that I can count on running it's full length is Enterprise). Other than news, and the occasional movie, I only watch *5* (yes 5) hours of TV programming regularly. If I could pay for the shows that were cancelled, I could set my TiVo up to record them at any inane hour of the day (3:30 AM? why not?). Especially since it'll be commercial free.
Of course, the entire TV industry would be turned upside down now that ratings don't really matter - just making money from the show.
- Especially bitter because of the number of shows he watched has been cancelled or will be cancelled. Heck, the way the TV stations and studios are going, I might not even need a TiVo or TV anymore - there would be *NOTHING* interesting on for me to watch.
Re:Somebody gains? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Difference between banner ads and TV ads (Score:2, Interesting)
the majority of banner ads are seen by people who are among the more intelligent
and the more intelligent you are, the less succeptible to ads you are
TV ads are aimed at a much larger group of people and probably have a significantly better take up ratio
Also, they are often targetted at the people who are likely to watch the program (like advertising date lines during the late night repeat of buffy to catch those 20 year old single men)
Perhaps TV ads arent as effective as some people think, they certainly do do a lot
Surprise. More FUD from the industry. (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd think that advertisers would get a clue.
Before I bought my Tivo, I was taping shows. I fast forwarded through commercials then too. Nothing has changed in that regard for most people.
If a commercial catches my eye while I'm fast-forwarding, I'll actually go back and watch it (usually if it has sufficient babe-content).
I think that the music and television industry's current "Greed Fest" is going to come back and bite them in the ass.
Welcome to the BBC (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes - it's the BBC. For those who might not know, there are no adverts on the BBC. We pay a 'license fee' (euphamism for a tax levy). This fee then goes towards paying for the BBC. In addition, the BBC also has some merchandising and sells off programmes to foreign stations.
But then you know that. It always raises a giggle from me when I'm in the US and I see PBS saying "it's only with your donations that we're able to bring you quality programming like the Teletubbies". Really? Leaving aside whether you believe Teletubbies to be quality (I do, for it's target audience), I could have sworn that the real reason it exists is because of my UK taxes going towards it...
So there's your answer. Directly funded TV is possible, and does exist. Just not in the US as far as I'm aware.
Cheers,
Ian
The solution (Score:1, Interesting)
For example, the screen will dim, and the viewer, expecting a commercial skips forward. Then sneakily, the screen returns to the show, revealing an earth shattering twist in the plot.
OR
With HDTV on the horizon, networks could always stick to their 'boxed TV style', and use the sides of the TV (its extra wide, remember) to display advertisements _while_ the show is airing.
Then there would be no interuptions ever, and the ads couldn't be avoided.
Unbundle the damn channels! (Score:2, Interesting)
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
Good. I want this. I'd gladly pay for the channels I watch. Then I'd only get the 10-15 channels I actually want, rather than the 100 or so I have to pay for to get the ones I want. The Beeb sustains 6 channels and umpteen radio stations on $9/month license fee. I'd gladly pay another £2-3/month for each channel I actually want, rather than the £35/month I pay now for what is mainly crap.
Ugh. (Score:4, Interesting)
Examine the evidence:
#1 Inability to prove that people actually are paying attention, or that they can influence spending in a significant way. Even if they can, are they being manipulative in an unethical way?
#2 Advertising pollution becoming increasingly intrusive, even for products that are directly paid for by the consumer. Can't drive down the road without seeing billboards, watch a movie, even in a theatre. On and on and on...
#3 They use money that might actually be used in more worthwhile ways by companies. Such as increased production, better employee benefits, R&D, planning for consequences... hell, you guys probably have a better idea than I do where the $$$ could go, including places that benefit consumers, employees AND shareholders.
#4 The difficulty of drawing the line between advertising and fraudulent claims. Before you boo and hiss, are Miss Cleo's commercials on tv at 2am valid advertising? How low does she have to go before it isn't? How many in the past have sunk that low?
#5 Existence of products that were market hits even without much of an ad campaign. Word of mouth and quality were good enough, and the product filled a real need (instead of trying to invent a dubious one).
#6 The ability of advertisers to steal people's valuable time from them, even when they haven't expressly or implicitly agreed to give such time (unlike watching TV). Well maybe the ability isn't the bad thing, but their willingness to exploit such an ability is unbounded. Only fear of law and PR backlash keeps them in check, and then not always.
Again, do we need this industry? If it disappears off the face of the earth, will we be so much poorer? The workers will adapt, find new employment, and our country would be stronger. And even if they don't deserve it, maybe a few idiots would get scammed less often.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really, it's a suppliment. The rest of the money comes from ... you guessed it ... adverts. If they really did scrap all adverts, then your monthly fee would skyrocket to the point that it would be horrendiously expensive and no-one would be prepared to pay for it.
Again, I point out that it only works in the UK because:
Re:Difference between banner ads and TV ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Tiger Woods has a staff the schedules when and where he will wear a particular shirt, pants or shoes. These items arrive in stores a day or two before he appears on TV wearing them. A few weeks after that they are shipped off to bargain basement stores like Marsalls or TJ Max.
TV ads are effective.
Which them cut their own throats (Score:2, Interesting)
Bottom Line: this is about control, not where the money comes from.
Q: about network schedules.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason I ask is that it seems to me that TV schedules function in an analagous fashion with DNS and IP addresses for web sites. Namely, if my Tivo doesn't know when the Simpsons is on, it can't record it for me. Is there any possibility the networks could try to sabotage PVRs by restricting access to their schedules?
Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nick Drake, Devo, Iggy Pop (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a pretty hard-core TiVo user, but I frequently watch ads. I'm not sure *why* I do, but I do. Mostly I hit that FF button when I'm really into the show or when the commercial's obnoxious...like those fsckin' Ford commercials with dogoffal country music playing.
how it will shake out (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless our government is full of idiots or media cronies (and it is, unfortunately), then here's how I see this "problem" shaking out:
The "entertainment" industry, which has been bloated with crap and getting fatter and fatter every year as wannabes climb over each other to get something published, will stop making so much money indiscriminately. The cash cow of advertising, now getting old and sick, will die off, and "free" TV will disappear. (I have not had "free" TV since 1989, when I first signed myself up for cable.)
The money in TV will shift from the producers of shows to the companies that deliver those shows--the makers of the DVRs and the suppliers of the DVR services. These companies, in order to keep profits high and unable to make fortunes on advertising, will charge consumers for their services, and they will use that money to fund programs that consumers will actually watch.
These services will license their most popular programs to the other vendors, and those vendors will probably charge premiums (pay-per-record, premium fees for non-native shows, etc.) for them to their clients.
In this way, the services will compete on overall quality of ALL their content--they won't have 18 hours to fill with crap every day, so they won't have the burden of those costs.
This is a Very Good Thing because it actually democratizes the content industry. Independent producers will be able to produce and license their shows to the DVR service companies. Big studios will still produce and license content, but they won't have the overhead of providing all the crap they do now.
All this assumes that Congress and our courts manage to keep their heads out of their arses and don't play lackey to the Chicken Little studios.
Re:Difference between banner ads and TV ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Where there's a lot of brand loyalty (Pepsi vs Coke), advertising doesn't cahgne people's opinions, and advertisers know it, but it does increase mindshare among the ambivalent and can increase consumption by the faithful.
Ultimately, though, the price of advertising is reflected in the price of the product. $1 of the average box of cereal pays for advertising. Do you think Kelloggs doesn't realize that? Are they going to stop all advertising so they can reduce the price of their cereals by $1? Nope. You can buy generic cereal for less. Some people do. Kelloggs, et alia, believe the advertising is worth it.
Re:Difference between banner ads and TV ads (Score:2, Interesting)
- Unawareness
- Awareness
- Comprehension
- Conviction
- Action
Ads in general are very good at creating awareness and comprehension. These are very important steps and may be accomplished within the first few seconds of a commercial, even before your hand hits the commercial skip button.The other steps are much harder to accomplish but sometimes you do them yourself. Have you ever compared 2 brands and told yourself, "I've never heard of this one. I'll get that one."? You were completing the conviction and action phases of the product you had heard about because you had not completed the awareness and comprehension phases of the brand you had not heard of.
Ads are effective but they aren't mind control. You don't jump out of your chair and buy a Schnepsi just because you saw it advertised on TV, but next time you are at the store you give Schnepsi some consideration instead of automatically purchasing a case of Schnoke.
Re:Tivo's answer: Semi-intrusive ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Happening in the UK too - yesterday we got an 'Unmissable viewing from the BBC!' message, with an average new sitcom attached.
My worry is the space requirements. I trust this thing gets deleted if I start running out of space? And I mean, deleted before any of my own programmes or even Tivo-suggested programmes get deleted? The suggestions are based on my preferences. The advert show clearly isn't. I do not want this advert interfering with what I bought the machine for in the first place.
Cheers,
Ian
You are right, but you miss part of the picture (Score:4, Interesting)
schon is absolutely right here, though the actual impact is missed (brand awareness is a very small part of the overall marketing picture).
Repetition is one of the most reliable indoctrination (often called by the misnomer "brain washing") techniques around, particularly if you are working without a deadline (if you do have a deadline, there are other, quite effective means of breaking a person and reconstructing the desired attitude, but while they are faster, none of these are anywhere near as reliable as simple repitition over an extended period of time). If you do not believe that marketing involves the application of serious indoctrination techniques, I suggest you read a couple of advanced textbooks, or graduate level thesis, on the subject. Indoctrination is most definitely what it is about, though that terminology is generally avoided.
In short, you can be talked into liking and desiring the most unlikely of things through sheer repetition, particularly if such repetition begins during early childhood (but it doesn't need to
When was the last time you made it through the day without seeing that logo, or hearing the name, at least once?
Advertisers do not want to allow us to change our viewing habits because doing so takes away one of the primary conduits by which they can condition us to want their products, and advertisers pay top dollar for access to these conditioning conduits. Believe it or not, we as viewers are sold as chattel to advertisers, literally, at a little over a dollar an hour for our viewership.
They have no desire to sell the content to us, to make us their customers. We are the chattel they sell to their paying customers today, the advertisers, and they don't believe they'll ever make as much money selling their entertainment to us as they do selling us to their advertisers.
It is rather a sobering and disturbing thought
Re:Makes me wonder ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, it's called books. Been a long damn time since one regularly saw sheefs of ads bound into the middle of a paperback (tho there was a time...)
What I'm saying is, if you're willing to pay the full price of production and delivery, hell yes. The question is, are you? If you are, write or email your favorite media producer and say: I hate these ads, I'm sickened by this sponsorship, I would gladly pay an extra fifty cents on the issue to have information instead of advertisements on the back of my maps. Of course, being as how you're surrounded by sheep it'll probably all be for naught. But if you care about it you should at least make your opinion known somewhere besides slashdot.
The idea that you can flip on the idiot box and there will be content without advertising or paying up front is of course simply impossible. Somebody has to pay. Okay, the real question then is how much? Well, according to an everage figure I got from a Jupiter Communications chart that appeared in the Morgan Stanley Internet Advertising Report, the Average CPM (Cost Per Thousand)for a 30 second TV add is $12.00 or in other words, roughly 1.2 cents for thirty seconds. An hour of teevee has about 20 minutes of commercials, so if you wanted to pay it off yourself, it would cost a little under 50 cents if my math is right to watch a 40 minute show (the average length of an hourlong commercial tevee program)... That's a little deceptive since the CPM figure multiple people watching a show on a single tube, technically for the numbers to work you would have to pay for each person watching.
Still. Consider: the average American watches roughly 1250 hours of teveee a year, so... the question is, would you pay 600 bucks a year, 50 additional bucks a month to watch all your teevee commercial free? I watch maybe 10 hours of teevee a week max and I'd gladly pay two to three hundred a year to get it commercial free and 2/3 the length (the amount of content is the amount of content, if I can get it out of the way in 40 instead of 60 minutes I say hell yes, after all who's got too much time?
You notice advertisers are not so quick to make us understand what these costs actually are, they want us to assume that the costs are prohibitive when they really are fairly standard (very comparable to a movie rental, tevee costs advertisers about a buck and a half per viewer for two uninterrupted hours). Hell, people might start thinking about whether it was worth the bother to watch if they really had to pay to play.
Consumers pay for ads regardless if they watch (Score:2, Interesting)
Ads are more than annoyances that people like to ignore/skip, they also cost us $.
pay-by-the-show? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would this work? For most people, it'd be cheaper or at most the same as what they're already paying. If they go on vacation for a couple weeks, either it doesn't cost them anything, or they'll be able to catch up on the shows when they get back. For the networks, they get fine-grained details of what people are watching, and will be able to easily manage their schedules. They could have special promotions for free showings of good but unpopular shows. And they'd be freed from the competition amongst the other networks for prime slots.
Re:Simple Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
* Allow PVR users to vote on commercials
This could possibly measure 4 things:
- The people that liked the commercial
- The people that didn't like the commercial
- The people that cared enough to vote (1+2)
- The people that didn't care enough to vote (if you know how many people watched a show)
People that buy Tivo are serious TV watchers and usually gadget heads - they have proven that they are willing to buy things ($500 worth, plus cable/satilite). Seems like it would be a good demographic to measure.The third and fourth measurements are important as well - as others have said, an advertisement is 90% successful if you just remember the product. If you enjoyed the commercial but couldn't remember the product, you've lost. Thus, I would think an ad that gets 1000 thumbs up and 9000 thumbs down might be more effective than an add that gets 900 thumbs up and 100 thumbs down. Even if you have no intention of buying the tech now, do you have a good idea what X10 could be used for?
It may mean giving up a little privacy (such as letting Tivo and it's advertising customers know what shows you watch), but there are benefits. If advertisers could subsidize Tivo so that the boxes cost $100 and the channel guide was free, then I'd have to consider buying Tivo for family for Christmas...
Plus, I'd love it when a cat commercial comes on to know what the cool song is...
Re:You are right, but you miss part of the picture (Score:2, Interesting)
Adverising also sometimes is associated with "success" : i.e. "Well that lawn care company advertises a lot, so they must be successful, so they must be good". I use exactly that thought process when I look up some esoteric business in the yellow pages: My criteria is "have I heard of them before?".
The answer is simple (or maybe not?) (Score:1, Interesting)
The advertising has to be embedded in the show itself, and no, this doesn't mean product placement.
Consider that most people are getting larger and higher-def TV's now, and they can display more legible information on the screen.
The broadcasters have to do the following for advertising to work (and it may not be well liked):
* Letterbox all shows, they like this anyhow as it preps people for HDTV. When HDTV is more prevalent, letterbox at a more extreme horizontal ratio than 16x9 or squeeze horizontally for sidebands.
* Put the adverts in the black bars or black sidebands.
* Slide the show image up and down into the space the black bars are in every so often (try to coincide with scene changes), it forces the eyes to move back to the main image allowing a glimmer of an advert to be forced to the viewer's eyes, and it also prevents masking the bars. If someone masks the bars, they would have to get up and move the masking, and this would be more trouble than it's worth in most instances. I'm sure workarounds will be made, electronic masking that moves, but such things are not as trivial as deleting interstitials.
* animated ad bugs like the current network identifier bugs, at any one of the four screen corners.
Interstitial adverts are going to die off whether advertisers like it or not, but there are alternatives. Audio will be available on demand on an existing second audio channel, maybe some kind of agreement w/ hw makers to have a "flash" button to swap over to hear advert audio.
Network execs haven't read Toffer (Score:4, Interesting)
The book was published (in 1979) at the time when home videocassette recorders were starting to become popular. What VCR's did was to effectively destroy the whole idea of synchonized television watching Toffler mentioned in this book, where everyone watched TV all at the same time. With VCR's (and now DVR's), you can record a TV program for viewing at a later time; the rise of VCR's was a big contributing factor in the ascendency of David Letterman's success (NBC's Late Night with David Letterman was one of the most recorded shows on TV, according to Nielsen Research).
Indeed, with VCR's being so inexpensive nowadays many people own more than one VCR; it makes even the idea of network counter-programming obselete since the viewer can record multiple shows at the same time and watch it later at their own leisure.
I think the networks will have to really start factoring in the wide use of VCR/DVR devices; in a way, ABC is already doing this by running a number of their ABC network first-run programs as a first rerun on the ABC Family cable channel.
Re:If they're so worried about Tivo (Score:3, Interesting)
The VCR also had a one minute skip.
At any rate, the ads fly by so quickly it's hard to determine what most of them are for.
Re:Q: about network schedules.... (Score:2, Interesting)
They already do. MTV, at least, seems to use those schedules as a way to trick people into recording the wrong show. More than once I have tried to recoed something like "Andy Dick" only to find that the first or lat 15 minutes isn't Andy Dick at all, but some lame new show they are trying to promote. Other networks do this to some degree (starting or ending 5-10 off of thier scheduled time for really popular shows), but I have yet to find anyone as bad as MTV.
Actually, you're only as right as your assumptions (Score:1, Interesting)
But if part of the purpose is to get people to actually BUY the product, I have to wonder how effective ads are.
I grew up in America, know more than I'd ever like to admit about Budweiser ad campaigns, Dad drank the stuff, and LOVE beer, but I won't drink Bud piss-water without VERY signifcant cash payments.
So, how is it again that my "brand awareness" helps their bottom line?
The case can be made that the purpose of the ads is then to expose ignorant consumers to their products and thereby get people to try them, SOME of whom will like the product and decide to stay with it. If this is really the reason, then why should the ad-supported networks have a problem with PVRs?
According to the studies, TiVo users still watch 40 to 50% of the commercials. Care to guess whether those commercials they do watch are more often for products they already know about, or ones that are totally new to them?
More likely their complaining and lawsuits isn't intended to really accomplish anything except to create publicity for PVRs and INCREASE their sales numbers. Then the industry can make even LOUDER complaints about the "rampant" digital piracy they claim is destroying them. The logical solution then becomes to get Congress to enact some SSSCA or CBDTPA-type legislation.
Re:You are right, but you miss part of the picture (Score:2, Interesting)