A Video Ad, In a Paper Magazine 295
lee1 writes "The first-ever video advertisement will be published in a traditional paper magazine — Entertainment Weekly — in September.
The video will be displayed on slim-line screens
around the size of a mobile phone display and will have rechargeable
batteries. The associated chip can hold up to 40 minutes of video, and uses technology similar to that used in singing greeting cards, playing
the movie when the page is turned. The first clips will preview CBS
shows and advertise Pepsi, but they will only be distributed in Los Angeles and New York.
Imagine the fun hacking possibilities."
fun hacking? Er..no. Imagine the annoyance... (Score:5, Insightful)
How long will it be before someone turns the page in the news paper and Jimbo from Jimbo's Used Cars and Ammo starts screaming about his amazing auto deals (free ammo with every car!) in a VERY LOUD OBNOXIOUS TONE?
Not long, that's my guess.
So this (Score:5, Insightful)
So this is the best usage for this technology they can find? How about changing 300lb university textbooks into paper thin alternatives? Updating libraries to use this new technology, increasing the life of the books... etc etc
Ad's? How.... capitilist..
Re:So this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:fun hacking? Er..no. Imagine the annoyance... (Score:3, Insightful)
How long will it be before someone turns the page in the news paper and Jimbo from Jimbo's Used Cars and Ammo starts screaming about his amazing auto deals (free ammo with every car!) in a VERY LOUD OBNOXIOUS TONE?
No need for Flashblock, just read with a hammer next to you.
It is believed that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Best line I've read all day.
"It's believed the new technology will cost much more than normal print ads."
That's the kind of biting, insightful comment I love from big media.
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So this (Score:4, Insightful)
Whens the last time you can think advertisters have footed the bill? Has the cost of your movie tickets dropped since they've introduced a half-hour of commericals into the movie theaters? Has the cost of your video games dropped since the inception of inline video game ad's?
Hardly. Relying on advertisers to lower the cost of new technology so that academia can reap its benefits is knowledge probably gained from an academic institute that is relying on advertisers to lower the cost of new technology.
and they wonder why... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet this is going to be a collectors item. Everybody in LA and New York will have to buy one. So, not only will EW get a huge sales boost, but there will be millions of people who are pushing, clawing, and begging just to watch the ads for their novelty. How many other ways can you get people to seek out your advertisement rather than have it forced upon them? I bet USA and Pepsi are paying through the nose for this.
Of course, the novelty aspect only works once. My guess is that we won't see this regularly until the technology becomes significantly cheaper (if even then).
Re:So this (Score:5, Insightful)
They're the ones paying the bills. I know, how capitalistic of me. But that's the system in play.
How about changing 300lb university textbooks into paper thin alternatives? Updating libraries to use this new technology, increasing the life of the books... etc etc
Fantastic ideas. How soon can we expect for you to get the betas out? The great thing about capitalism is that if think this is a good idea for the technology you can make a play at being one of the first ones to market with the product. Why are you waiting for someone else to take up the cause? If you're waiting for the government to take the lead, which I'm guessing you are by slighting capitalism, you are going to have a long wait.
Capitalism has a really cruddy underside because someone has to lose for someone else to win but it's also this same reason that people step up to challenges such as this. Having an incentive to produce has worked out pretty well. You can still champion the idea if you want to do it for "ethical" reasons and give your profits away. No one is stopping you.
Re:Youtube video of the product... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the carbon footprint of this thing? I mean, jesus, I'm going to have some explaining to do to my daughter when she gets older about my generation and what it prioritised...
Waste of resources (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So this (Score:4, Insightful)
Except print media relies on ads to pay the bills, The cost you pay tends to pay a very tiny portion of the actual cost production - most of that cost is distribution (printing, shipping to distributors, distributor markup, shipping to retailers, retailer markup, etc), which is how they can easily make subscriptions 50+% off the cover price.
In this case, the ads pay for the technology behind this. If it's successful, more advertisers would want it in more magazines, which implies that developments would make the technology cheaper. And when the technology gets cheap enough, it'll be everywhere.
Advertisers are paying for this, plus the normal ad fees. If it succeeds, it forms a demand for this technology, making it cheaper so everyone else can add video to their pages for little extra cost.
Re:So what toxic materials are in it (Score:5, Insightful)
And let's face it, the vast majority of the readership aren't geeks, so they won't be hacking these things.
And to hell with my karma. It's for garbage like these that I can afford to burn it.
Or maybe they would... (Score:5, Insightful)
The crisis in the newspaper industry:
a) They're all giving away their content for free on the internet, print subscriptions are falling through the floor.
b) No single paper can charge internet subscriptions, because people will just turn to other papers.
c) Web ad revenue brings in less money than print ad revenue used to.
d) Craig's List has completely destroyed the lucrative classified ads revenue source.
So basically, they haven't found a way to make enough money to do the journalism that we expect from them. The whole industry is sinking, from the best of them to the worst.
Save the trees and ink... (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't like it but want the magazine? Easily done! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, if it's possible to erase the ad content and use the mini-player for other video, I think I (and at least half of
Re:So this (Score:5, Insightful)
Most new video games cost $59.99 - the same as new SNES games cost in 1994. That's another 30% drop after accounting for inflation, not to mention the hugely increased costs of development since then.
It stands to reason that if content producers can recoup some of their costs via alternative revenue models, competition will force the prices down.
I can see it now... annoying, loud, obnoxious. (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine this: A person is quietly reading a magazine in a quiet and peaceful room. Suddenly, as he flips the page, a video advertisement is played, displaying the Pepsi logo, filling the room with a low-quality, low-bitrate sound of the Pepsi jingle so loud everyone in the room turns and looks at him. And, guess what? NO WAY TO STOP THE DAMN AD!
Come September, this will be a reality.
First TV ads got louder and louder and annoyed the shit out of me to the point where I can't even watch TV anymore. Then Internet ads did the same. Now fucking paper ads will annoy me.
I, for one, will not purchase a product whose developers chose to advertise in this manner, nor will I purchase magazines that have these ads. Fuck you, spammers!
Re:Yes. With Sound. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is such a great idea - far better than, I don't know, moving the whole newspaper online or onto an ebook reader.
Oh wait, the opposite of that.
Re:So what toxic materials are in it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So this (Score:3, Insightful)
Free-as-in-beer broadcast TV? Much of the free-as-in-beer content on the internet? A number of free-as-in-beer local newsweeklies? The vast majority of the cost of not-free print daily newspapers?
kids, bah (Score:2, Insightful)
...and I remember indoor movie tickets costing *35 cents* and there were two movies, plus cartoons, plus a newsreel. And it was about the only place that had air conditioning. [lawn,off, and etc]. And cokes were a nickle and calls from a payphone were a nickle. No shyte.
But it's better now even if you only get one movie and it costs ten bucks. (mostly because you really don't have to go there and you can get the movie for less than ten bucks and watch it at home)
I wouldn't swap the internet and electronic miniaturization and so on for all that old tech. It was good enough, but it's better now in a lot of ways. Now I like older cars and trucks because they had some personality to them, but that tech is better now too. More complicated, but better.
*Some* old tech is still good and useful, but progress is progress. The tech then in the 35 cent movie days was a lot better than the 1800s. Stuff gets better because people want it better and we have a ton more smart guys working on stuff now. I have no flying car or hawt babe amazon warrior robot army...but all in all it's a lot better now. My major beef is a lot of stuff is really unfixable for most practical definitions of fixable. It works or chunk it, that part I don't like and I still hang onto way too much broken stuff now from inertia, because everything used to be somewhat fixable by joe average with a box of tools, or there was some dude on the corner with a shop and he could do it, cheap. That's pretty much gone now.
Re:You know, (Score:3, Insightful)
You're kidding, right?
The answer is: no, not to any appreciable degree.
You do know what happens to all those 9V, AA, and AAA batteries you see in grocery stores after people use them up, right? How about the batteries in laptops? Yeah, that's right: the average person throws them away. As in, in the landfill.
If they don't throw them away when they die, they throw them in the trash when they're doing some housecleaning or getting ready to move. Even in the locations where recycling batteries is possible and suggested, batteries are accepted at the dump/landfill. Especially for something like a car battery: people will throw that sucker away if they can (and can't get it exchanged for a discount on the new one).
Re:kids, bah (Score:3, Insightful)
I know this is going waaay off topic, but I beg to differ that modern consumer equipment must be unrepairable.
Oh, I grant you that it is, and that is also something frustrating to me to no end. I'm just suggesting that this is by design, and that some company... if they really want to assert that they are green and not just give lip service... could design equipment to be repaired by an ordinary technician trained at a 2-year community college. Unfortunately that might take more than a simple start-up to get it to work out, and would take a radical change in current manufacturing processes to make it happen.
I worked for a manufacturing company that mostly did business to business products, where the products simply had to be repairable in order to meet the customer's needs. Computer equipment that was over 20 years old continued to live on (running on MS-DOS, interestingly enough... and some early CP/M variant for some of the equipment) and even serviced. The largest problem was simply trying to find chip manufacturers who were even willing to supply parts for stuff that old if it broke. Electronics produced in the 1990's is actually harder to find parts for than stuff made in the 1980's, as it turns out.
The local second hand stores (aka Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc.) stopped any kind of repair program about 20 years ago and have all but stopped even accepting electronics, unless you can turn them on and prove they still work. There are some specialized electronics recyclers, but that is an exception rather than a rule for these stores. This includes more mundane consumer appliances like toasters, televisions, and waffle irons that are even hard to repair any more, but used to be routinely repaired in earlier decades.
novel idea (Score:4, Insightful)
The more ads I see, the more I get pissed at advertisement in general.
I have a truly novel idea. Maybe I should patent it. How about we charge for the actual content, save a lot of money on all the staff and equipment that doesn't have to negotiate, draft, implement, print, etc. all the advertisement anymore, and end up with a smaller, more content-dense product? I'll call it "business purpose re-engineering".
You see, when your business has slowly eroded from informing your customers to selling your customers, and your customers have started to notice and are leaving you in droves, it might be time to change back, instead of speeding up.
Re:novel idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you ready to pay $15-$20 (or more) for an issue that used to cost you $6, purely for the privilege of not having ads?
Yes
Do you think >90% of consumers are?
No.
But if you want my money, you play by my rules. That other 90% market is pretty much saturated anyways. So why not get a large share of the 10% market, instead of a tiny share of the 90% market? Your overal market share may end up to be higher.
But, of course, in this time of hyper-capitalism, nobody is happy with owning a factory or a shop or selling to a specific audience anymore. It's got to be international corporations, franchises and chains and when it comes to market, the key word is "dominating", not "pleasing".