Forced commercials with infinite show variety

[jasong]

I couldn't think of a better title. I wanted to run something by you guys.

What if you could have any movie, television episode, talk show episode, news show from whatever day, instantly on your tv, for free, as long as you were willing to deal with 5 minutes of un-fastforwardable commercials for every hour you get your personalized content.

Forrest Gump for sitting through a cleaning product commercial. Ben Hur and an advertisement for the latest Nissan. Star Wars with an attempt to get you to buy Grape Nuts.

Would you go for that? I suppose one determinant is how much 5 minutes is worth to you. A minimum wager is more likely to like this setup than a more upscale worker. Also, certain puritans might want to pay to watch their favorite movie in "pure" form.

But think of those families who use television as a babysitter. Any Disney movie over 3-4 years old at your fingertips. Your 3 year-old could call up Barney 24-7. Need to cook something? How about 5,000 cooking shows, available at the click of a button.

An internet company(Yahoo I think) hired their own embedded reporter overseas. He's probably going to get millions of hits in the first month, but have you ever tried to use your computer as a TV? It's darn slow, you get what you want, but most people get it more slowly than they can view it, unless they're willing to deal with a small screen.

Forget video on your ipod, what about video-on-demand EVERYWHERE!!!

[CaptainMooseInc]

well see....a lot of cable companies are offering Video On Demand at no extra charge. Many movies are free and the "new" ones that hit HBO, Cinemax, etc, all are available free on demand if you subcribe to even just 1 of the channels from that content provider.

Your concept is a bit tough to do because then much of the "targeted" advertising would be gone. Companies are looking to show you their message 2-4 times in an hour long span (on a certain channel). With much of the VOD going around today you can just fast forward it (even online, I just move the little bar to the end of the advertisement to see the video I want).

Advertising is going to shift from commericals to during the show advertising. You will begin seeing more Coke bottles instead of glasses filled with a dark liquid. This is the big way of advertising in movies and always has been.

Once TV shifts to a larger scale On Demand you'll see this grow with normal TV shows. It's done already but not on a massive scale like movies.

Right now Comcast offers (in at least my area) over 3000 hours of FREE On Demand content.

That's good enough for now. :)

-Jeff

[PCZ]

Jasong
Somehow i don't think your idea would fly.
5 minutes an hour would not be enough.

Most 1 hour shows are only 41 minutes long, some only 38 minutes :(
I gave up watching commercial TV a long time ago because of this.

[CaptainMooseInc]

Yeah, that's true PCZ. I forgot how when you buy a Season DVD of something you can watch 3 episodes an hour. :)

If you buy a cartoon DVD most episodes are around 10-12 minutes each.

And jasong, I took a TV/Radio class and we had to watch (for homework) and hour of television and TIME commercials and write down what they were about and how many there were in an hour.

One hour of prime time on the local Fox network yielded around 5-8 commercials over a 2 minute and 30 second timespan. I counted almost 60 commercials in that one hour.

Now since you like doing math so much and bringing up math problems just to kill some time do the math on this one.

2 minutes and 30 seconds = 150 seconds total.
150 seconds times an average of 8 commercial breaks during an hour = 1200 seconds of commercials.

In an hour there are 3600 seconds. 1200/3600 = 1/3.

That means you have to watch 1 minute of commercials for every 3 minutes of video content.

Do you really think advertisers/TV head honchos are going to want to fully switch to 5 minutes for 1 hour of content? That means one minute of commercials for every 12 minutes of video....

I would say that fails to compare...

-Jeff

[PCZ]

Recently i bought the Prisoner on DVD.
The episodes are 48 minutes long.

So when this series was originally shown there were 12 minutes an hour of adverts.
Now it is 20 minutes, 22 minutes for some shows.

It's no wonder that folks download xvids of all the popular shows and watch them advert free.

Also Paying a subscription to SKY and still being bombared with 20 mins an hour of ads really p's me off.

[jasong]

I haven't really had to worry about commercials for about the last 9 months, I just Tivo everything I'm interested in. For instance, I have no idea what day Las Vegas comes on, but when it does it shows up on my Tivo.

And deleting things only takes up about a minute a day.