BitTorrent Inc. Introduces Ad-Supported Downloads 115
BTJunkie writes "BitTorrent Inc. is experimenting with alternatives to paid downloads on their Entertainment Network, and is now experimenting with advertising supported downloads. This news comes nearly one month after the initial release of the Entertainment Network, a possible sign of failure.'The ad-supported model is currently being tested on episodes by the video gamers network G4, but is likely to be tested on episodes from other publishers in the future. The video ads are short video clips delivered by YuMe Networks, a company that is specialized in IP based video ads. YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi said that the company expects to deliver more user targeted video ads as soon as BitTorrent Inc. signs more deals with publishers that want to experiment with ad-supported downloads.'"
BitTorrent Inc. concept flawed from the start (Score:5, Insightful)
The flaw in this logic is a failure to understand the success of the BitTorrent protocol. People use BitTorrent because they don't have the money to pay for the bandwidth to distribute what they are distributing because they don't have a revenue model.
However, if you have a half-decent revenue model, such as advertising, revenue easily offsets the bandwidth costs of distributing video from a central server over HTTP, so why put your users through the pain of having to install a piece of client software?
BitTorrent's problem is that anyone that can afford to pay them for their services can probably afford to distribute their content over HTTP from a centralized server, and why wouldn't they given the much lower barrier to entry for their users?
Re:Yuk (Score:4, Insightful)
Er? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yuk (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really - it merely shifts the costs, and costs more because of implementation expense. Advertising requires significant expenditure in the people who work in the field. That expense is borne out by the customer - as all expenses eventually are. Advertising is overhead. Overhead should always be minimized.
Re:Yuk (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm.... advertising is a way to influence people buy stuff. See the generic/store brands at your favorite grocer. Cheaper *and* no advertising needed.
In the absence of ads, people are generally smart enough to know what they need, when they need it. The world as we know it wouldn't grind to a financial halt if advertisers were to die off in some mass extinction, in spite of what sales people would like you to think.
Not even full episodes (Score:3, Insightful)
The ad-supported downloads don't even appear to be full episodes of the G4 shows, just segments. These are already available for free via G4's podcasts, so why in the world would anyone want to go through the trouble of downloading them over bittorrent?
Plus, to make matters worse, the download rate was only 65K/sec, which is pretty very slow for my internet connection. The video quality wasn't even that good, something that would have made the bittorrent.com version better than the podcast version.
Bittorrent.com really needs to stop treating their potential customers like idiots and offer some incentive to use their products instead of the competition. The fact that they use the bittorrent protocol should lower their costs on the bandwidth side, but it increases the complexity on the customer's side. They really need to do something to make up for that (much lower prices or extremely high quality).
Re:BitTorrent Inc. concept flawed from the start (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, if this turns out to be a highly desirable feature, browsers will soon support P2P without the need for external/plugin software.
Re:Yuk (Score:5, Insightful)
Without advertising, I doubt so many people would be buying things they don't need and overextending their credit to do so. While the world wouldn't grind to a financial halt, it would slow down significantly, probably causing a major recession/depression. The economy is unfortunately very dependent on the stupid people of the world who use their paycheck as a ticket to shop till they drop for useless crap.
I used to be married to someone like that.
Make ads people want to download (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at all the ads that are on YouTube as content and actively downloaded. Even on my PVR I rewind and watch again good commercials. The problem with advertising and IPTV is that they force stupid, annoying, and pointless ads in a shotgun fashion assuming a captive audience. Run creative ads and use search terms and the like to target them. I figure Google is going to clean up big time on this on YouTube very soon.
I'm a single guy who doesn't drive but loves anime. If they would kill all the car ads, and the tampon ads and run anime and asian film ads I'd be as happy as a clam, toss in a link to the online store or ticket purchase and I'd be even happier. My democracy player downloads these ads automatically.
In the same fashion NewType magazine runs a DVD in every issue which has about three single anime episodes and a pile of trailers. While it's effectively pure advertising, its one of the most popular features, and when they discontinued it, readers made them bring it back. I've ended up buying many entire series based on the previews on those disks. That's focused and effective advertising.
The most effective email advertising I've ever encountered is the favorites search option on eBay. I get emails on a regular basis for stuff I'm actively seeking. I read every email and end up purchasing a reasonable percentage of items.
Re:Yuk (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising is designed by the worlds best psychologists to make you feel unhappy with your life as it is, so you will go buy something. They work even if you ignore them. What you are experiencing is the surrendering to their influence that happens when you just give up under the bombardment and the accompanying rationalization. If you cut yourself off from the constant bombardment of ads for a little while, you'll be shocked.
Advertisers, with knowledge and intent, systematically manipulate people to react according to their primitive responses instead of with reasoned responses, contrary to peoples larger self interest and for personal gain.
And they've carved an industry for themselves out of the fact that "Superior Performing Product A" will be ignored in the face of competition from "Inferior Performing Product B" assisted by the pervasive advertising machine.
Their tactics are so effective that to a certain extent they've made themselves the gatekeepers of the so called free market economy.
They're fucking evil.
Television producers should move to bittorrent (Score:2, Insightful)
I totally foresee a future in which bittorrent becomes the "mainstream" medium, television is rendered obsolete, and big-name television producers stop "broadcasting" shows, they just upload them to bittorrent -- with the commercial breaks put right into the video file.
As it is now, when people rip video from television and upload it, they take the time to remove the commercials -- because hey, you're already going to all of the trouble to rip it, upload it, and attach your name to it, why not make it quality? Pirating is all about your rep.
But if the producers just played into the torrent fad, then no one would have to rip the videos themselves -- and since the videos are being handed to people on a silver platter, my guess is that no one would bother to take the time to recut the video to be commercial-free and upload it again to another torrent (which would be illegal and probably have less seeds/leeches as a result). Of course, people would probably be quite likely to skip the commercials while watching, but whether or not they skip them would probably depend on the product being advertised -- a commercial would probably have about 5 seconds to grab the viewer's attention, lest it be skipped. Since you're uploading these programs to the internet (and don't have to deal with the cable provider), you can pick and choose your own targeted advertising ... I wonder how advertising for shows gets
picked now?
Also, it isn't as if people don't "skip" the commercials on television already -- they walk away to use the bathroom, get something to eat, or even just change the channel until the commercials are over.
Doesn't this sound like a win-win situation? The consumers get the product for free, whenever they want it, and the producers reach a MUCH larger audience with their advertising (thereby increasing advertising revenues -- also, since the popularity of a torrent can easily be gauged by keeping track of how many people have/are downloading it, the popularity of a torrent could become the new "ratings" system, determining how valuable getting commercials onto that file would be for an advertiser).
One final thing, I wonder how much cheaper it would be to upload a TV show onto bittorrent than it would be to get it on a cable channel? I don't know all of the specifics, but it seems totally feasible that the television producers could make more money than they do now by using free torrents to distribute their shows -- even while providing the product for free! After all, free product = more users = better advertising profits.
PS Sorry about double-posting, I tend to forget paragraph tags when I'm excited about an idea.
Re:Yuk (Score:5, Insightful)
As ortholattice says, one of the most intractable problems for the US economy today is the extension of expensive credit. The savings rate is MINUS ONE PERCENT. We are told that this is a great and booming economy, but everybody owes more this year than they did last year, and the cost of carrying that credit is more expensive than ever.
We have just started to see an unprecedented level of mortgage forfeiture. People will lose their homes like never before because they used the little bit of equity they had built up in their houses to pay off their credit cards, and they did so by snapping up all the insane adjustable rate mortgages and interest-only home equity loans. It all worked as long as prices went up. With just the merest contraction in the housing market, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people are going to get hurt when their monthly mortgage payments quadruple.
Advertising. Making you want something you don't need, making you want something you don't want. Making you want something that's bad for you. It's the economic equivalent to religious fanaticism. The "free-market" radicals that have been driving this country and our economy since WWII have lied to us. The free market only serves to shrink the number of people who have power and wealth. The only way this game ends is by the vast majority of us living in near poverty, working 60 hours a week just to live.
I'm looking at a graph published in the Detroit Free Press that was made using US Census data. Since 2000, the average income of Americans has gone down by between 6 and 9 percent. That takes into account the nice raise that you think you got back in January. Yet, your president tells you that we've got the strongest economy in years. What he leaves out is that it's strongest for him and his pals. You and me? Not so much.
Sure, you've got a swell 42" HDTV screen, a nice car, and a couple of the latest game consoles. But only because your credit cards are working harder than ever before. What you really have is indenture to the credit industry. We're getting screwed and advertising is the pimp. As long as you can keep moving up, getting those raises, avoiding layoffs, moving those balances from card to card it'll seem like it's all working. Do you know what those in the credit industry call people who pay their credit card balances in full every month? "Deadbeats". Seriously. They hate people who pay their bills on time and are responsible.
Advertising is not your friend. Neither is "faith-based" finance.
Re:Yuk (Score:3, Insightful)
* The first is the obvious costs of creating and distributing the advertising including the administration surrounding that process. Note, that when I say the cost to distribute the advertisment, I am talking about the cost for the distributor to distribute the advertisment.
* The second cost is the time wasted by those looking at (or just avoiding) the advertisments. This is an incredible cost. The majority of viewers don't use ad filtering tools or machines like Tivo. Also, while it is possible to time advertising with bathroom breaks, time broken up into small chunks is worth much less than a contiguous period of time.
* The third cost is the direct effect that advertising has on people's purchasing decisions. Advertising directly aims to undermine the consumers information about products by trumphing their own product as the best, and it is very effective at doing that. As everyone should know, the key to an effective market economy is informed consumers. The problem becomes obvious...
* Information pollution is also a cost. Tired of seeing billboards whereever you go? Not to mention that excessive advertising hides real information. The best example of this is search engine optimization. Advertiser pay money to fool search engines, while useful information disappears under loads of paid ads.
The sad thing is that advertising won't decrease anytime soon. Advertising is unfortunally effective, and it is a viscious cycle where the only response is for the opposing businesses is to buy their own advertisment. I would go as far as to say that advertising in its different forms is the bureaucracy of the libertarian society.
Buying Luxury = Stupid? (Score:2, Insightful)