The State of Automated Commercial Skipping 381
iskqy writes "Even though attention to commerical skipping has gone down since the motion picture studios sued replaytv for it, I've noticed that it appears to be alive and well in some PVR products on the market. ReplayTV PVRs have it (though different from what they got sued for) in what they call Show|Nav (what a terrible feature name!) and SnapStream's Beyond TV has it in a feature they call SmartSkip. In both cases, the user has to press a button to automagically skip a commercial (vs. the original ReplayTV feature which skipped them without any user intervention) but it's basically the same thing. ReplayTV plays down commercial skipping ("jump forward and back between scenes in a show") but SnapStream is more open about the feature ("Skip commercials and other parts of TV shows"). "
Flawed business model? (Score:4, Insightful)
Advertising "product placement" (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking forward to seeing bart's room covered in butterfinger wrappers.
Commercials are ok - once (Score:5, Insightful)
If a commercial / ad actually imparts information or entertainment value, then I enjoy and look forward to it, the first couple times. Too many commercials
It is unfortunate that advertisers believe (and possibly rightfully so) that consumers are more likely to purchase a product if they are repeatedly exposed to an ad that does not actually provide information about the product, but instead annoys the heck out of them due to content or frequency of occurrence.
Much like elections, it usually comes down to name recognition.
Skipping ads is nice, but .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Commercial skipping is nice nonetheless, although I'm not sure how useful automatic skipping is; I'e never tried it. TiVo also has the ability to skip 30-second chunks of shows. Just start playing something from "Now Playing." Press Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. You'll hear 3 "dings." Now when you press the "jump-to-live" button, you'll skip 30 seconds at a time. You have to repeat this procedure if the TiVo gets rebooted.
What's with extra commercials anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, on pay television and free to air, I'm seeing 8-12 advertisements in each slot, and massive amounts of the shows I watch being cut out. Last time I watched X-Files (only because I know it used to be 43 minutes per episode when first shown) the entire show was cut down to 35 minutes. that's eight minutes of the show I want to watch gone, and over 80 advertisements.
Now. What's the difference? What's so pricey nowadays that requires so many advertisements constantly?
Pricey reality television shows. blah.
NOT the end of commercials (Score:3, Insightful)
Subtle and not so subtle product placements [foxnews.com] will ensure that we continue to see advertising every time we watch TV, despite our best efforts.
I suggest listening to public streaming radio [radio.cbc.ca] (in ogg format no less) as a wonderful alternative to the tripe Madison avenue continues to shove down your throat.
Unless you like tripe. [tripesite.com] Whatever floats your boat.
Re:Perhaps this'll help (Score:1, Insightful)
Ummm, no. Ads are how a tv station makes money. They have no other sources of revenue. Without money, they go out of business.
Re:More intelligence needed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flawed business model? (Score:2, Insightful)
Trust me when I say that I hate commercials as much as the next person. The does not mean that networks are in the wrong for showing them. That is how they make money.
If you want advertising to go away then you can kiss "free" publications goodbye with the exception of non-profits.
Everything has an associated cost somewhere unless those doing it are not getting paid.
I want auto skip back!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course this is why the media industry sued ReplayTV into oblivion. Cut out the ads and you significantly cut their revenue and ability to produce the shows. Too bad cable/satellite TV isn't more like the current state of satellite radio -- way fewer ads per program hour! Paying for cable TV seems to only get me more ads targeted to my demographic group.
Skipping Overt Ads Will Lead To Covert Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Disney owns ABC, ESPN and the Discovery Channel. How often on ESPN does one see "the stars" of that great new hit on ABC? How often does ABC tout programs on ESPN? And now, Discovery is in the act too, offering us "documentaries" on the magic behind Disney World in Orlando. And of course, who owns Disney World? Disney.
Films made by Sony's studios almost always feature Sony equipment when a given character is using his or her PC. Also, the word "SONY" is often in huge black letters on the rear of a monitor, even though they aren't usually so prominent on the products shipped to Joe Consumer from the factory.
Add to that the PAID product placements like Coca-Cola being drunk by a given character. There are many of those.
And finally, the grand-daddy of product advertising discguised as content: NASCAR. Each car is festooned with no less than twenty different sponsors, starting with the make and model of the auto being raced (even they have exactly one part in common with their street version: the roof panel) plus the major sponsor of the driver, plus the minor sponsor plus all the super-minor sponsors not the least of which is NACAR itself. The whole race is a rotating advertisement, one which the competitors are trying not only to beat each other but also to gain the most exposure time for their sponsors. A higher position on the track means more "impressions" for the sponsors on the viewers. Best of all, when a driver is interviewed, he thanks 1) God 2) his crew and of course his sponsors for painting his "Folger's/Viargra/Ford/Taurus" in their colors. The entire event is, in short, an ad.
That's direction we're headed. Like death, taxes and Microsoft security flaws, one simply cannot avoid marketing. It's simply more malleable than are the viewers or listeners of a given content.
Car ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flawed business model? (Score:4, Insightful)
THIEF!!!
I'll bet that you even have a pop-up blocker installed on your computer, you evil bastard.
Re:maybe im missing something... (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:state of commercials (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:maybe im missing something... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cable stations often replace sections of advertisments with their own local ones. Some shows are repeated on different networks with different ads.
The show is a copyrighted work. The commercials are each individual copyrighted works. I'd keep typing, but you see where I'm going with this...
Re:Car ads (Score:4, Insightful)
How often would you think about buying a new car if you never saw a car commercial?
Re:maybe im missing something... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's with extra commercials anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
And they have the gall to wonder why nobody is watching TV anymore. Most ads on the internet can be skipped as soon as you are done viewing them. Sometimes on a slow connection, even before. Funny how nobody is rushing out to buy a digital TV set. They are fighting over the broadcast flag and can't get anybody to spend the large investment in a tuner to pick up free TV. It's dying with the analog signal in the US unless someone gets a clue. The silly flag will be meaningless. Nobody's watching. Nobody has a tuner.
Ya I know, the one or two of you out there with a tuner will correct me, but I haven't met anybody in my neighborhood with a digital television receiver ready to receive over the air network television digital transmissions. A PC DTV tuner only half counts. The content on Broadcast TV is no longer the killer app to sell televisions.
Re:state of commercials (Score:3, Insightful)
- Serge
The Best Method Of Commercial Skipping (Score:2, Insightful)
SpamAssassin-style comercial skipping? (Score:3, Insightful)
1. The blackout interval. Sometimes though, like on Frasier there's blackouts during the program.
2. The audio levels
3. Closed captioning. Are commercials closed captioned? I haven't goofed off with CC settings for a while. My advent tv seems to have several of them.
4. network bug detection.
Perhaps using a combination of the 4 above can do perfect commercial skippage. Then have it make a small database of which times it skipped commercials a day/week before to give it a general guideline on when to do it again.
Take your anti-spam tech and use it towards tv commercials.
Re:Flawed business model? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can change channels when a show jumps to commercials, I can mute the sound when a show jumps to commercials, I can even video tape a show and watch it at a later time - as many times as I like to. Because presentation is different from copyright. I can re-present a copyrighted work to myself, if I have an authorized copy of it. I am not licensed to watch a copyrighted broadcast work - there are no limits on how I may use it, as long as I don't break copyright law.
Read that again - there are no limits on how I may use it, as long as I don't break copyright law.
I am under no obligation to buy all of the advertised products. I am under no obligation to give due consideration to the advertised products. I am under no obligation to pay attention to the advertised products. I am under no obligation to watch the products be advertised. Even though, if I were to do all of those things, it would make the broadcast business more successful, and those reasons are in fact the only reason why the business is providing a broadcast television signal.
McDonalds could hire a guy to stand in a Hamburgler suit, and hand out $1 bills to everyone that walks into the restaurant. They are legally allowed to give things away for free. They can expect people to notice that they're giving away something for free. They can expect people to buy more of what they're selling, because they've given away something for free. But the people have no legal obligation to notice, or to buy the products!
It's advertising! Even the television program itself is advertisement for the products in the commercials. "Notice me! Buy this!" Certain forms of advertising are illegal - false advertising comes to mind. But as long as consumers obey copyright, they are allowed to do anything they want to with the advertisements! They provide me with a free product, broadcast television, and they hope that I'll watch the commercials. A car company could give away free cars, loaded with 10% off coupons for McDonalds. If I don't sign any contracts, then I am under no license, there are no limits on my use of their free product, and I don't have to drive their car to freaking McDonalds. If they program the car to automatically drive to McDonalds, then I can chose not to use the car - but under the DMCA, I am prohibited from tampering with the device, and I must merely accept what it does - drive me to McDonalds - as long as that causes me no harm. I may not personally like that law, but it is the law.
It doesn't matter that you're correct that if people completely ignored advertising, that "free" publications would go away. They have no legal protection that their business practice of giving away something free will always result in increased sales. They're relying on psychology, that repeated presentation increases the perceived desirability of a product. They're using your mind against you. I can use my remote control against them.
Everything has an associated cost somewhere unless those doing it are not getting paid.
They are giving away something for free, and they hope that you'll be tricked into buying their products. They're chosing the cost of giving away something for free - I am not accepting the responsibility to pay them. If I signed an agreement saying that I would watch commercials in exchange for video programming, then they would have a legal right to force me to watch their commercials - it's a contract, and both parties profit - I get TV, and they get me to do what they want - watch their commercials.
I HAVE SIGNED NO CONTRACT. THEY'RE HANDING OUT FREE GOODS. THEY HAVE NO LEGAL RIGHT TO MAKE ME WATCH THEIR COMMERCIALS.
edit scripts (Score:1, Insightful)
How would they be distributed? Enthusiastic users would watch the shows when they were on, or shortly after, and note the exact time that each commercial break starts and stops. They'd then post these to a forum, where there could be some form of
Re:maybe im missing something... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, I defer to any lawyers here and hope to hear any rebuttals they may have to the following. Just having completed a copyright course (and thus having a little dangerous knowledge), I offer the following:
Copyright subsists at fixation (17 USC 102), so, as another poster noted, the shows and commercials are obviously separately copyrighted. If the shows are then fixed with commercials interposed, then a copyright would also presumably exist for the compliation of the shows and commercials. This is likely not how it is done as it would seem that the commercials would be served from a separate source in real time. If this is true, the channel stream viewed by the user would not necessarily have a copyright as a compliation. On the other hand, I would expect, if determination of the order and identity of the shows and interposed commercials is done by a file, the file would be copyrightable and thus protectable. [This follows from a case we studied on the Duke Nukem game in which so-called "MAP" files which had no graphics but which controlled the display of library graphics were basically held copyrightable.]
I think this doesn't matter, however. It is a well-known copyright tenet that derivative works are not created by unfixed alterations of performances/displays. For example, if you hold up pink cellophane in front of a television to make everything appear pink, you have not created a derivative work (the pinkified work was not fixed in any physical medium), although photographing the result would. This example was from Judge Kosinski (spelling?) of the 9th Circuit in the Duke Nukem case referenced previously. This is also why people with sunglasses aren't sued for creating derivative works of everything they see. So, blacking out commercials or skipping them would seem to clearly not create a derivative work.
The most likely way for broadcasters to prevent commercial skipping would seem to be under some form of moral rights. Moral rights protects against mutilation or unauthorized modification of works of art. However, first, the broadcasters would have to prove a television broadcast was a work of art, which seems unlikely (I mean, the shows in combination with commercials interposed). Second, in the US, at the federal level at least, protection of visual works does not extend to movies or television (see the definition of visual art under 17 USC 101). So this fails as well.
Re:Commercials are ok - once (Score:3, Insightful)
When Coke was doing their blind product testing for New Coke, people liked the new recipe and Coke thought they were onto something. But a lot of people liked the original Coke because of those impressions - it reminded them of their first kiss, or going somewhere with their parents, etc.
When the formula changed, some people lost their connection to those impressions and declared that they didn't like the new formula - even if they picked it as a preference in a blind test. The problem was that Coke asked the wrong question in their assessment. They asked 'Which tastes better', rather than 'Which would you buy'. Coke is the product that empirically tastes worse, but people would prefer to buy. It's a catch-22 for Coke, since they crafted those impressions in the first place and are now have to live with them. If it was a ploy to switch from sugar to other sweeteners, then it backfired horribly.
If you think really hard, most people can identify some impressions such as this. My son will probably always associate Egg McMuffins with spending time with his father since that's a little habit we have (McD's is across the street from my house so we walk there for breakfast). I associate Dennys with going skiiing with my family, and so on.
Re:Flawed business model? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think anyone thinks that commercials should disappear. It's a matter that networks have made commercials monumentally annoying, and are willing to put the extra effort into skipping them because of that annoyance.
Additionally, I don't think you'll find that people are complaining that over-the-air broadcasts should be commercial-free, but you could certainly say that cable/satellite TV should be, since you are paying a few dollars for each station, per-person, per month.
Also, programming is getting crappier (no nostalga here, it really is much crappier) and if you had to tolerate the nasty commercials, it wouldn't be worth watching. Networks should consider these boxes their saviors, otherwise nobody would be willing to watch their stations, and nobody would then be paying their providers and keeping the stations on the air.
Right now, stations are so terrible that the market is ripe for the picking. Put on a handful of decent station, decent content, and non-iritating commercial, and you'd take-over. Unfortunately, stations that seemed to be doing that (eg. Bravo) got swallowed up by big companies with other annoying channels (eg. NBC/Time Warner) who don't want people to have an alternative.
No then, I'd be more than happy to pay a few bucks for each commercial-free channel I recieved, but I don't have that option. I strongly dislike the programming on HBO/Showtime and even if I didn't cable companies want too much money, and don't offer them without $40++ basic service as well.
So, I'm disgusted with the whole thing, and there doesn't seem to be much alternative out there. If things get much worse, I'll just cancel my cable service, and invest that money in upgrading my netflix service.
Re:Flawed business model? (Score:4, Insightful)
div_2n: If you are viewing their network programming they do. They provide you with programming for the low price of watching commercials.
That is saying that "they [have] a right to force you to watch commercials." There is no price for the consumer associated with watching broadcast television. The television station is providing something for free - that means with no price. Not a low price as you indicate, but with no price.
"Expect" is a dangerous phrase when you start talking about law, div_2n. There's the conversational usage, which means something akin to, "I believe," and there's the legal definition which is much closer to "I am entitled to." They may believe that they can make money from giving away a free product, but they have no entitlement to that money. They have done nothing which guarantees (or entitles) them to profit. They have chosen to give away something for free, and can have no expectations beyond the protection of their rights, which are limited almost exclusively to those of being copyright holders over the material that they broadcasted.
Don't get so defensive about your rights.
Don't post stupid comments. Like this one. If you didn't want to engage in a conversation, then you shouldn't have posted. When you attack personal rights, people get defensive.
I don't have a right to free TV, you are correct. But if free TV is made available to me, then I am WELL within my rights to use it within the bounds of the law. For instance, not watching the freaking commercials. Or buying a product that helps me not watch the commercials.
They could expect revenue (different from profit), if I had agreed to terms, including providing something (like watching commercials), in return for that service being provided. I HAVE NOT AGREED TO ANY TERMS. I am making use of a free product. They cannot expect any revenue from that. They have no rights in this conversation, other than as granted them by copyright law.
Don't get so defensive of the profit motive of multi-billion-dollar corporations. My rights are far more important than their profits.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)