Hurray! The trade publications are finally getting around to writing about “TV Everywhere” and now at least mentioning that the plan is to include the same ad load as on TV.
Advertising Age has a good primer on it, including juicy nuggets like this:
What’s the ad model
A TV-length commercial ad load disables fast-forwarding, due to increased frustration among programmers who are selling top-tier TV shows with a third of their on-air ads online. Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting, said a typical on-air episode of “The Closer” runs 18 ads*, which is why it makes little to no revenue sense for the network to run the same episode online with a third of the same commercials against it. “If I can get 4.5 times my TV CPM online [the cost to advertisers to reach 1,000 viewers], I’d be happy and wouldn’t need to do anything,” he said. “But nobody’s getting four times TV CPMs online. Nobody at Hulu’s getting twice the TV CPMs. If people who already watch the show see it with a full commercial load, it’s still a chance to catch up on shows they miss.”
On-Demand with disabled fast-forward! That’s something Bill and I both have always wondered, “Hey, why don’t they do that?” We like the idea. You don’t need to incur the monthly DVR subscription fees to still watch programs on your own schedule.
If you want to skip ads you can subscribe to DVR services. Currently, less than a third of the homes in the US are equipped with DVRs, so the market for a “no extra” cost service for those who already have cable set top boxes isn’t tiny.
Mr Wakshlag is the poster boy for “TV Everywhere” and is perhaps the hardest working man in research when it comes to stumping for good measurement. He has been almost ubiquitous and I give him a lot of credit for turning up the heat on Nielsen:
“My next TV season is this summer, I’ve got three nights of top-flight dramas on TNT coming out this summer — same thing’s happening on TBS and TruTV. I want these impressions counted next summer,” he said. “If it’s going to take 18 months, there’s no reason to put my content out there at all because I’m not going to go around my partners at Time Warner or Comcast — why should I put it up there if I’m going around their content distribution system?”
Read the whole Ad Age article for yourself and then decided whether you think Jason Kilar has a long future at Hulu. I worry that Jason really does want to provide the best consumer experience possible. But if the best consumer experience doesn’t provide many ads, but also doesn’t make any money… In matters like these I always think back to the golden age of the late 1990s when boys and girls on scooters would deliver soft drinks and DVDs, and video games (and even Palm Pilots and Kit Kat bars) to my door at retail prices and no extra delivery fees.
It was the best customer experience ever. Sadly, Kozmo.com went out of business.
*Doesn’t include ad time for the cable providers or network promos
The key question for me is how many of regular online viewers of authorized content know how/where to find unauthorized content. If it’s a significant part, which I believe it is, there is a more important question: how many ads can I run without people finding it so burdensome that they prefer a commercial-free unauthorized copy run elsewhere?
A half minute five times a show doesn’t bother me. Increase that to a minute and a half six times, as the article seems to suggest, and people will disappear faster than you can say ‘megavideo’.
Scott R., my guess is that most people will put up with a lot of commercials before hassling with something else. Unlike music, where it was free vs. pay, the idea of watching commercials vs. hassling (even a little) with something else causes folks to stick with Hulu or other “official” venues.
I think age has a great deal to do with it. In the case of music, even when it was “free” you had to have heard about Napster, know where to download it and how to configure it, and then learn how to use it. On a college campus that was a given. Among fortysomething professionals and homemakers…often not the case. Though knowledge of the technology had advanced in the decade since, I think some of that still holds true, where if you look at the population as you get older the typical knowledge base shifts from truly web savvy to merely web competent. The chasm between the two is significant, and when you’re talking about watching a show in an hour versus 41 minutes, I think it’s enough to be a deal breaker for those in the ‘web savvy’ pile.
How are download sites a hassle though? I have a $90 miniature DVD player hooked up to my HDTV via HDMI and upconverting my shows to HD. I connect a Flash drive or external hard drive to the back of it filled with shows. I download the shows after searching for less than 5 minutes on Google (usually less than a minute and on the first page of the search results), and it takes about 3 minutes to download them on my 3 MBps Cable connection (350 MB/40 min). It is really very easy, no commercials, and better quality than SD cable most of the time. I really think that this is just going to get more and more popular. I feel sorry for the TV networks that they are not getting the money, but unfortunately they think they can stick to their old tired business models forever.
. I download the shows after searching for less than 5 minutes on Google (usually less than a minute and on the first page of the search results).
It doesn’t sound like much, but *you* are willing to do a *lot* more work than the average viewer in our opinion.
What you really have to watch out for is the Internet TV in Windows 7. Currently all is fine with this as it is hooking up to existing streams from Content providers.
It is relatively easy to write a plug-in for Windows 7 Media center that will go out to all the those other not so kosher content providers that will let you select a show and will then let you view episodes.
This is the real downfall to more commercials. I never watch TV on the computer but on my TV hooked up to the computer. Make it convenient with the remote to get content without commercials and then see what happens.
I am not sure about posting links here so delete this if it is unappropriate but here is a good read about ads and on line viewing..
news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10383572-261.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1
we’re fine with links (though if you post more than one with a http:// it will wind up in the spam filter)
I’ve been a big Media Center user since 2004. I suspect with Windows 7 it will be much the same as it was with Vista and XP in that most people who have Media Center won’t even know it or use it. At one point there was a study that suggested even with computers and laptops equipped with a TV Tuner and an Internet connection, hardly anyone used it.
My guess is that the plugins that MSFT itself promotes will be the ones that bring in the content with the full commercial loads.
I don’t see the Windows 7 version being any more of a threat than Boxee, which is to say currently, not much of a threat at all. I hooked up my computer to my TV in 2004. In 2009, more people are doing it but I wouldn’t say it’s catching on big. In 2014, who knows?
How does the Hulu thing work if you want to go back and re-watch something. If that was before a commercial break do you have to re-watch the commercial?
@ JustTunedIn
Hulu normally doesn’t make you rewatch a commercial if you go back without leaving the page and before the video ends. However, I am pretty sure that when I go back multiple commercial breaks I still watch all but the first one. On occasion though it seems like these premises do not apply, so even as a regular Hulu user I’m not completely sure how it works.