An article at Critical-Miss discusses the recent announcement made by Comcast and Tivo which discusses an innovation in television advertising.
On the surface, I think it is quite a neat idea. For one, it addresses the shift in viewing behavior caused by Tivo (and other DVR/PVRs). Many people spend much of their television viewing time watching Tivo’d shows. That is, they are not watching live television. This makes advertising about a 3-day sale at Macy’s fairly irrelevant. As the number of people engaging in this type of viewing behavior increases, the relevancy of this type of advertising decreases.
As the relevancy of network television advertising becomes less relevant, won’t advertisers be less inclined to pay for the advertising that supports the production of shows on the networks? Don’t get me wrong, I do not feel sorry for the moguls who cash fat checks while churning out hour after hour of low-quality television. But, that isn’t entirely relevant to this issue and would require a dedicated article. Maybe an article bearing the title, “Not Another Reality Show!”
Television networks need to generate advertising revenue in the same way that Public Television needs to hold regular fund-raising drives. The Tivo (and again, similar devices) are threatening the network’s ability to generate that revenue. Obviously content providers (the networks) and content distributors (cable companies, etc) are extremely interested in maintaining the revenue, but why should Tivo care? (note: sometimes an entity can act as content provider and content distributor, and this can be quite scary… but, again, a case of not being really relevant to this article.)
Tivo cares because it is faced with major competition from content distributors who are releasing their own competing DVR products (as well as competition from software companies whose software allows people to create their own PVRs). Competition (especially from the content distributors) is quite stiff. Tivo understands that relying on its superior product won’t be able to combat its competitors’ abilities to undercut Tivo pricing. In order to combat this, Tivo has been licensing its technology to other companies and forming alliances. DirecTivo was one of the earliest examples of this, and the partnership with Comcast is just the most recent.
One way to aid in the creating of future partnerships is to come up with ways to provide/ensure advertising revenue. An example of a somewhat hackish attempt is the pop-up ads that appear when a person is fast-forwarding through commercials. There is lively debate centered around the motivations for such an obviously poor implementation of this and it has pissed off some loyal Tivo customers.
Another way to provide/ensure advertising revenue is to make sure that when a person watches a particular program that he/she Tivo’d, it has relevant advertising. Of course, relevant could mean timely, but it could also mean targeted. Both, I think, are extremely interesting. Just imagine watching a show you Tivo’d a year ago and seeing an ad for a local car-dealership’s President’s Day sale… for this year! Also, imagine if that show was sent to you from a family member who lives across the country and it still showed a car dealership that was local to you. Kinda neat, in my opinion. This seems, to me, to be a logical next step in advertising in general, and it will be interesting to see just how Comcast and Tivo end up implementing their version of relevant advertising.
One problem I can see with this is in the case that a person has intentionally recorded commercials. The Superbowl is a good example of when the commercials are sometimes of equal importance to the actual show being broadcast. If somebody recorded the controversial commercial that Company X aired and wanted to show their buddies the commercial several weeks later, would it even be there? Or, would it have been replaced by a newer, seemingly more relevant commercial? Again, this comes back to how exactly Comcast and Tivo will implement this feature.
I suppose, we will have to wait and see. I, for one, don’t own a Tivo and am not directly affected by this. But, this technology could certaily have a great affect on television advertising in general.
Thank the gods for a WinXP MCE box with automatic updates turned off and archives to DVD. Comcast can shove their new ads right up their collective asses. Do they not understand that one of the reasons people like to use PVRs is to FAST FORWARD through the commercials?
Um, you could still fast forward through these new swapped-in commercials.
Yes, but there is no reason to swap in new commercials and use up more HD space if we aren’t going to watch them anyway, is what I am saying.
Wadn’t quite how the OC reads, but sure.
Theoretically, if they actually cared about disk usage, they could write over the commercials in all stored shows each night with new downloads, thus using no more space.
Also, tivo viewing data has shown (too lazy to dig up the articles) that people with dvrs do, in fact, watch commercials. Primarily movie trailers and ads for tv shows, but they do watch ads.
To be blunt, so fucking what? I don’t know about you, but I already something like $100 / mo. for my cable television service — if the networks that produce the shows aren’t seeing any of that money, well, that’s not my fault.
My point is very simple: I pay to watch television. I do not receive the programming I watch for free. I do not pay to watch commericals, and I don’t pay for an internet connection so that my TiVo can use it to download more commericals. So I don’t feel sorry for the “networks”.
They are in the exact same business as the recording industry: the business of artificial scarcity. The widespread adoption of more and better computers, and larger and faster computer networks, has put the lie to the old story that if it weren’t for the big media companies, there wouldn’t be any media.
Sorry, gentlemen, but it’s only going to get worse for you from here on in.
Damn, I’m ranting like Carl. I guess this is the one subject that really gets me fuming… (^_-)
Yea, a bit like Carl.
But, I guess the point I was trying to get across was two-fold:
1. I can understand why Tivo is doing what its doing (to a certain extent)
2. I think the idea is neat
Using idle bandwidth to download data is something that my current DVR already does, and my DishNetwork uses my telephone when I am not using it as well. So, for the Tivo to do the same, doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. As you pointed out, we have more and better computers, and larger and faster computer networks (can’t wait for fiber-to-the-home!), there seems to be plenty of bandwidth.
Also, I wasn’t trying to defend Comcast or Tivo. I despise Comcast and find their price-gouging to be unacceptable. Its the one reason I have Dish Network and chose to purchase my hi-speed internet through Galaxy Internet (even though money still goes to Comcast, it just makes me *feel* a little better).
As much as I would like to focus purely on how odd it is that J and I are on the same side of a debate for once- I pay $120 a month for cable and internet, and don’t even watch the networks (no Fox, ABC, CBS, or NBC for me)- I am going to instead mention how there must be a technical workaround.
At first I thought simply locking down the relevant ports on a firewall would do the trick, but TiVo probably thought of that and will probably use either the ports they already require to be open (80, 8080, 37 UDP/TCP, 123 UDP), or suddenly ‘require’ a new one, perhaps through a software revision.
So yeah, maybe something that severely limits traffic would do the trick. I mean, hell, you gotta figure they won’t be passing down all this content to modem users, right? So maybe the solution (for people with home phone lines), is to take their TiVo off the network and wire it back into the phone system, like ye olden days. Sadly, that won’t work for people without phone lines, and paying an extra $30 a month just to avoid commercials seems like extortion.
Carl, this is talking specifically about the upcoming set-top tivo boxes distributed by comcast. Unless you want to disconnect your set-top from the cable input, I’m guessing you’re not blocking this.
J, you’ll probably like this, assuming you haven’t already seen it. Now if only they could set up a subscription service for non-UK citizens…