Once again the lack of a workable micro-payments system distorts the market on the internet.

If we could trust the advertisers not to spread their sad messages all over the programs there may be some merit in the idea, but we all know what will happen. Because nobody wants to watch the ads, they will be skipped, so FF will be disabled, then DOGs will be introduced and soon Internet TV will be as bad as broadcast TV.

Trumpeting how ads can't be easily removed or skipped always makes me laugh because SOMEONE will crack their system in five seconds flat. BUT if they make their system easy to use and the ads are no more obnoxious than commercial TV (preferably less so) then they stand a good chance of success.

Because if the experience isn't painful then the vast majority of people won't be bothered to circumvent the ads. The vastly over-amplified voices complaining online are ultimately a tiny minority who will have very little impact on the success of this approach IF it's implemented well. If, on the other hand, they screw it up, these online voices will be very effective at pointing out the flaws.

Does anyone seriously think there is an "uncrackable" software application that can force users ("customers") to watch commercials?

The publishers might make more money taking odds on how quickly the uncrackable software will be cracked.

If the ad method described is successful, what is there to keep them from applying technology to pre-recorded DVDs of movies and TV shows? Then people will pay a premium for versions without ad content. Even the most agreeable ad to watch becomes annoying after repeated viewings, why that is, I haven't an answer, perhaps Seth Stevenson knows the reason.

Then there are those of us who don't watch any TV at all. Not even online. We're the people with still-functioning braincells.

If they can make the ads bearable and appear not too often, this will work. The trick is getting the level right, too many ads and as others have mentioned, someone will crack it the code and the business model will fail.

Cracked doesn't mean automatic failure - look at DVDs and iTunes for examples. Both were cracked years ago and continually cracked when modified, but they continue to rake in mountains of money. (The games industry is hit substantially harder by cracks, however.)

This is interesting. I like to watch premium video content, don't have the time or opportunity to do so on terrestrial channels, and do understand that the content needs to be supported by a revenue model. These things are doable.

I'd happily suffer a few ads and a secure and anonymous phone-home connection, if it meant that the production of the material I enjoy is being properly funded. If the producer's web site offered download/torrent links, then they'd become natural portals for fans and could then offer forums, interviews, etc (The Battlestar Galactica site is an excellent example of this) all of which could be funded by more ads. This could build a loyal community of viewers that could help promote the shows and would be attractive to online advertisers. Everybody wins.

How does that tie in with tools like mediaMVP or iTV? I own a MediaMVP and I use it, but it will only read mpegs and some avis, and certainly not Hiro's format, which I assume will be proprietary (otherwise it would be too easy to release another player that reads Hiro files but does skip the ads). It will be difficult for something like this to catch on if people need to buy new hardware.

What if a cache of comercials was pre-downloaded on your machine and they played while your show was buffering? Nice and convenient, can be targeted to the viewer. The pre-cached ads could be provided by a third party (google?) who doles out the revenue to the content providers.

Google ads have something in common with magazine ads – you see them but don’t pay attention unless you want to. Google has figured out how to monetize this feature - magazines have not. Thus making goodle ads arguable more valuable both to the advertiser and to the consumer. It would be nice (and more valuable) if internet TV could do the same. Hiro’s process doesn’t do that so it’s not a step forward for consumers. It just moves the same-old to a different sized box.

Why couldn't the Hiro system allow the viewer to pay to not see the ads?

IMarv

The day after an internet video player appears that disables fast forwarding through specific pieces of content (glorious advertisements) a hack will appear to circumvent this feature.

What would really be interesting is if the web based media viewer was tied to a user account activated by a credit card. Imagine a Google User Account that had a valid credit card attached. In order to have a credit card you need to be over 18, so the media viewer could not allow you to watch certain R rated programs if you didn't have a credit card.

Taking this one step further, a Google Account contains all your browsing and ad clicking history. Google knows all the searches you have done and all the ads you have clicked on, so it would be easy for them to give you specific targeted ads.

When viewing American Idol you could see an advertisement for a local auto repair shop to fix your car that broke down earlier that day.

Now thats Orwellian.

I still think that product placement within the show or commercials sequed into by the characters are more effective.

When I listen to my favorite podcasts I don't fast forward through their commercials because the hosts themselves are endorsing the product and usually do so in their usual amusing or insightful manner. And if they are simply talking about how good the product is in the context of the show then the commercial is an integral part of the entertainment.

This may be harder to do in a script based sitcom or drama, but I think that may have to be the future of advertising on video.

I can't agree with you: if a viewer is annoyed at an ad, takes action to skip it and this action is fruitless, then he will associate being force-fed with the brand---that is bad advertising. I appreciate that great shows need targeted ads to pay for themselves, but if the ads are irrelevant, save the advertisers money.

In addition, I would like to tell that three major American broadcasters screw their on-line advertisers by offering ads to non-American viewers, but not the show: without an North-American IP, you get a 15 seconds ad about a service (which you don't care about because it is not available to you) then a 1 second message "The show is not available from your destination" and then more ads. Before figuring out after five ads that one should freeze the flickering screen to understand why the show takes so much time to start, an international viewer gave the network as many times more money. With about 10% of visitors from abroad (a reasonable amount for the Internet service) that is one third of the advertisers money stolen, and one more person convinced that piracy is the only way to proper content.

The business model may have a glitch if the ads are truly embedded. Why? Take a particular episode of a TV show. You sell a few ads, embed them, and release the package into the internet for distribution. That's it. You can't really re-sell space on the same episode again (at least not for as high a price---presumably a re-release of the same episode would be less valuable because the old release is already taking up prime internet real estate), so you have to price the ad sales high enough to compensate for the full lifetime value of ad space on the show.

And, somewhat strangely, such a long-running ad may have less value to many advertisers---movie studios, electronics makers, media companies, consumer product makers, etc.---whose offerings change frequently.

If those two guesses (and I acknowledge they are just guesses) are right, the market for this otherwise very interesting idea may be limited.

It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to include a service which, for a fee, deletes the commercials, no?

Do you know what I hate about my DVD player? That I bought a Japanese unit that can't disable the lockouts. Nothing makes me madder than pushing MENU and being told to 'talk to the hand'.

My next one will be a cheap Chinese unit that I will have researched as being flashable to fix that defect, region coding, etc. And I won't be considering either HiDef format until the user interface and DRM defects are fixable.

Currently I get none of those issues when playing a DVD with Xine or Mplayer, why would I want some crappy locked player on my PC? When I know it will go through even more periods where the Linux version doesn't work/is obsolete than Flash Player? Why would I prefer the crippled version of a program/movie when there WILL be an open one available, one that than be archived longer than the expiration date (and yes, there WILL be one) on the crippled copy, one that can be transcoded for portable devices, DVD players, etc. And more importantly, WHY would Icontribute P2P or sneakernet bandwidth to helping distribute a crippled copy?

For what it's worth, a little creativity can go a long way. My kids noticed something in a GE commercial and had the DVR step through each frame at the end. Very cool. We now remember this commercial well. Very well. http://www.ge.com/onesecondtheater

If the ads are shown based on a database of things that I want to see ads for, then I would really like this. If all my shows had ads for tools and cars and computers, and no ads for mascara, annuities, or car dealerships, then I would watch this exclusively.

IMarvinTPA is onto something IMHO!

Give viewer the now familiar 'skip this ad' option informing them of the cost of not watching the ad. Cost & revenue dispersal TBD.

Also provide an 'Always Skip' & 'Always Skip Ads from ...' buttons. Ad Gateway could feed/sell viewer preference info back to advertisers &/or ad creators.

The problem is push ads,and Hiro's solution is push harder! As a result their technology will be classified as damage and routed around.
I don't hate ads, I hate bad, irrelevant ads I have no control over. If an ad is witty, or provides me with immediately useful information, I'll watch it, and probably re-watch it in a heartbeat.
eBay sends me ads based upon my requested search criteria, which I read and often act upon. Google offers ads based upon context and search criteria, and often gets a click through. One of the wonderful bits about YouTube is that it is pretty good about giving you another video you want to see after the one you watched is over. All of this is pull advertising, which is targeted and very effective. And best achieved with smart media.

I guess this applies to non-broadcast content? The local affiliates are already upset about rebroadcasts on the network website.

This is, once again, a purely commercial offering with no consideration for the viewer. You know what my wife (and now I) do when a commercial plays before a video and she can't skip it? She turns the volume down, looks away from the screen and sings "la la la" Our 2-year-old thinks it's funny, but she's learning that commercials are bad.

Most TV commercials distract from the entertainment, are not entertaining themselves, but rather irrelevant and insulting to our intelligence.

I really don't see an option like this taking off, except in the case of content you can't get anywhere else. Because if DVR eats a program and my choices are commercials I can't skip or commercials I can from some guy who recorded it off air and put it online, I'm going to choose the version that has commercials I can skip.

Let's find a business model that works -- one that isn't so anti-consumer. (Maybe something that allows us to rate/skip the ads much in the way LaunchCast lets us rate/skip songs and uses that to serve up what we're most likely to like?)

What about the subscription model? I'd rather pay to subscribe to an on-demand service that lets me watch whatever I want, whenever I want, without ads, then sit through ads... aka Netflix. If I have to sit through ads, I won't watch, period.

The biggest problem I have with forcing ads into material that has already been released via cable or broadcast media is that those original ads have already paid for the production and distribution costs. It follows that the revenue stream needed to transcode and redistribute over different media channels should be significantly lower, but in practice we see outrageous fees being charged for broadcast and cable TV programming sold through iTunes and other on line services. It's just another example of big media ripping off the viewing and listening public, and the main justification crackers use when they "free" protected content. There's no way I'd waste time viewing forced ad on line content, just as I don't now waste time watching "live" TV and instead rely on TiVo. The TiVo subscription model works: I get the content I want, when I want to watch it, and TiVo gets a fee for providing that service. No complicated payment schemes, and I always know in advance what it's gonna cost me per month, no matter how much content I consume. Somehow fold those features into on line viewing, and I might be interested. Otherwise, services like Hiro are a non-starter.

Hey guys...pick up a good book...you do remember those don't you. I've changed my life style a little. I read about 1-1.5 hours
a night (westerns right now) I think about it at work some time and smile wondering what's next. Yes I watch TV but only specific
programs. I don't turn on the TV when I walk in the door and turn
it off to go to sleep. I also took the tv out of the bed room. I put it in the garage to watch the game while doing all my "honey do's".
Read more.....use your brain.

The commercials are killing me. Yet I still need them; at least for the products I'm interested in. In my opinion the the greatest asset of iTunes $2.00 programs is the lack of commercial interruptions, especially the way they stack them towards the end of my favorite programs. It's killing me. Yet I still need them. As an aapl share holder I propose to Apple Inc./ iTunes division that they set up "Commercials" area just as they have done with movie trailers. The advertisers will pay, quality of the commercials will improve, people will enjoy focused marketing that they can choose for themselves, and Apple will make more money and my stock goes up. Eventually it could offset the cost of the program.

Another fundamental failing of Hiro's and Neokast's approach is the concept that consumers really want less functionality in a new product. This basic assumption of all DRM companies is going to make the dotbombs assumptions look brilliant in comparison.
Even Joe Sixpack is accoustomed to time shifting, fast forwarding and skipping commercials.

It seems that everyone is trying to figure out a commercial style that consumers will watch and doesn't disrupt program content. I never forward past (or mute) the commercials on PBS at the beginning of a program. They are short and make the point, and being at the begnning... never disrupt content. They aren't annoying. For me, a 10 second PBS "sponsored by" commercial is more effective than a 3min mute-the-tv-go-to-the-bathroom commercial group on regular television. But therein lies part of the problem. Regular TV is focused on making money. PBS seems more focused on content. Imagine "Live at Lincoln Center" having commercials in the middle. It would completely mess up the experience and mood.

So clever people have found out how to insert commercials that can't be skipped, and they feel this is what people are demanding now. I don't think so. If commercials were all that great an experience for the viewer, then the All-Commercials-All-The-Time cable channel would have been created, and be the hit of the home market.

So they won't let you fast forward through said commercials. That makes this service less attractive than TiVo, and much less attractive than DVR's with the 30-second skip still enabled. And while dozens of smart people are figuring out how to make commercials unavoidable, hundreds to thousands of others are figuring out how to cut them out of this newest distribution model. If there's a piece of code in the data file that says, "Go to the internet and get a new commercial for this spot now," wanna bet that data file filters removing or altering that instruction won't be tried. Not to say, hacking their obviously priopriatary player.

For a long enough time you had no choice. Television was what it was and you watched what they gave you. Then Sony, especially the day Beta-Scan hit the market (visual fast forward, to you VHS only people), created a technology solution that allowed you to watch only What you wanted, and When you wanted to watch it. The technological and legal see-saw has continued ever since. And the more you piss people off by trying to make them behave the way You want them too (i.e. watch your commercials and buy those products until you're in the poorhouse), the more they'll push back.

You might even find less commercials are much better than more commercials, but that would require a sudden dawning of common sense on the part of the television and advertising industry.

No one has yet figured out how to keep your butt in the chair, and you eyes on the screen, while said commercials are running.

Just for the record, I'm one of those odd users who survives on BitTorrent and DVDs. I'm indifferent to TV - I watch it when it's there, but I don't care enough to sign up for it.

I suggest that content providers like TV, Music, and Movie studios study the inelastic, downward sloping demand curve. It's one of the few morsels of wisdom I gleaned out Samuelson's economic text in college that makes any sense at all.

"The inelastic demand curve" suggests that sometimes consumers sensitivity to price is so acute, that small movements up or down will cause vast movements in demand. With regard to the internet distribution of TV shows, music, and movies, I think Steve Jobs is the only one in the industry that really gets this. His courageous fight to keep the price of an iTune at $.99 was key to the success of that model. I suspect that if that price were to somehow drop to, say, $.25, and rights management were removed, music piracy would all but disappear. At the same time, sales volume would soar exponentially. It's just not worth $100 to gather and compile all the obscure songs I remember from my sophomore hop, but at $25, it's very tempting.

What Steve understands that few in the production establishment do, is that customers don't pay for the content, they pay for the convenience - the convenience of knowing exactly where that content is, knowing it's going to be of good and consistent quality, and knowing that downloading it will not F_ _ _-up their computers. That is the only value that music and movie studios can add and that is the only real reason most customers are willing to pay for content. Everything else is just legal intimidation.

As most tech savvy teenagers already know, anyone who wants to spend the time, can get virtually any content they want for free, wether that content is a copy of Windows, The Godfather, or Tutti Fruiti. You're probably never going to sell that market (tech savvy kids with lots of time on their hands) any digital content. Half the fun is getting it for free. What really vexes the music establishment is that this market happens to be a huge segment for the most profitable product in their portfolio - current hit music. Since current hit music was the first digital content distributed online to the general public, this issue has continued to cloud the digital distribution issue.

But to most of us, time is our most precious resource. If watching the GodFather cost only $.50, most adults wouldn't even bother keeping a copy of the DVD on the shelf, they'd just buy a copy every time they wanted to watch it.

My wife bought me an Apple TV for my birthday and over the weekend I purchased two 500 gig hard drives to upgrade my computer to hold all the content for it. As I was installing them in my old G4 it occurred to me, "Wow, this is a terabyte of storage!" "Why in the hell do I want to manage, store, and back-up a terabyte of content?"

The answer I came up with was simple, until I can watch The Godfather when and where I want to for about fifty cents, I guess I'll have to keep "ripping" my Netflicks.

All good and well, but this carries the same burden that has caused other approaches to fail: you will have to use Hiro's media player!!! How will it compete with the mature stable players like VLC, Quicktime, etc...? Proprietary players suck, and that is the only way you can enforce the type of viewing you are talking about.

Well said, Skip. Makes you wonder if any of those record execs took economics 101?

Until commercials are targeted to my interests and do not consume so much time (currently, over 25% of a half-hour show...more on special broadcasts), I will happily pay or do whatever I can to avoid them. Not only do I not wish to waste my time, I simply do not buy on advertised content...word-of-mouth, experience, quality and price are much more important. To put it another way, I will try another product I see on the shelf if one of those mechanisms makes an alternative attractive enough.

I like tom's point. Take a look at how Podshow is doing advertising on their video and audio content. It's much more enticing. The current method of advertising is backwards: advertisers support a show. It should be the other way around. A show or some content supports the advertisers and promotes them because they have a worthy product or service. Podshow has recognized this to some degree (and probably much more than they have let out of the bag yet). In a naked world that's advertising that works best.

Also, making advertising less shotgun and more niche is the way of the future. Google is proof of that concept.

Lastly, with any DRM or associated technology there's two sides. The company creating the DRM technology and the unlimited number of people in the public creating a way around it. We all know who wins.

For this consumer, the notion of downloading television regularly is "nuts". Most of us out here in internet-land are paying for bandwidth. My son's youtube usage has been curtailed due to astronical fees for going over the 5GB bandwitdth limit, bumping that limit up would mean internet TV is MUCH MORE expensive than regular TV, and slow to boot. And the notion that I would PAY for a commercial's conent to download enfuriates me to no end.

I think we're still along way away from the net being useul for this. Unless the economics change drastically (maybe this article speaks to that).

For me, tivo will continue to be much more useful than anything the net can deliver, at least for the forseeable future.

This is the ultimate solution to making video content widely available on the internet. However for this to be truly effective the commercials and the approach to advertising will have to be changed -- improved to work with the medium. Today many newspapers put their content on the internet, but very little advertising and usually very little income comes from the website. They could put their print advertisements on the web, but it wouldn't help anyone for obvious reasons. A website advertisement should promote products and services in a way conducive to the medium. The same is true for internet video advertisements. If I were to receive an advertisement over the internet for a car, I'd like to be able to search for a nearby dealer, look at different models, get prices, etc. Just seeing an advertisement as I would on TV doesn't help me. If I don't spend money it doesn't help the advertiser either.

Current print and TV advertisements are designed for an audience that may take action LATER. Internet advertisements are best when the audience can take action immediately. See something, click on it, buy it. That is what advertisements for internet video must do.

"If an Internet connection is available the ads can even be coordinated with a database and targeted at the presumed interests of the viewer. This is true not just for the initial downloader, but also for everycopy of that show distributed in almost any fashion." Cringely

how is this wonderful feature utilized and privacy retained?

How is all this add targeting information obtained?
How secure would this information be when the info now is stolen it seems all to easily.
It just amazes me how I hear again and again the wonder of "targeted adds" without anyone making the connection to privacy.
What do you feel when you get a call from some boiler room marketing outfit that knows your "personal & private" financial information? Your loan? your house?

I like CVOS's final comment "Now that is Orwellian" indeed!

Am I just turning into a curmudgeon, or is television advertising a massively offensive intrusion into one's personal brain-space?
I just can't figure out how or why we stand for compulsorily being forced to suffer through this garbage (not that I do, mind, but almost everyone else does). Magazine-style advertising, on the other hand, is fine: if you don't like it, turn the page. If you do, read it. Maybe even buy something. Google works the same way... always inoffensive, occasionally useful; everyone wins.

There has to be a reasonable way to make that apply to video content. Why any #&@!*(#@! jerk would want to find out a way to move a rotten and dysfunctional system over to replace a genuine improvement is beyond stupidity. The average IQ of the western population briefly arrested its decline, but is about to resume its plunge. Oh well.

The obvious question not being answered here:

How are inserted ads any harder to remove than DRM for hackers who want to do so?

And again, once you have one clean digital copy, it's all over but the free distribution.

Which is going to happen anyway, so why bother? Well, according to you, the "business model"?

The fact is that this whole exercise is merely a ploy to get the industry to embrace the Net. They're going to find out once they do that the ad model works fine - for those people who don't care about ads - which is most people.

They're also going to find out that for those people who hate ads and want free, those people are still going to get free from the hackers.

But that's true today.

So what's changed here? Just the perception of the media industry that something's changed.

Hmm, can they let me choose the ads I watch?

I don't mind ads so much as long as I don't:
1. see the same ad again and again and again...
2. get blasted by noise (ok, I'm over 50 )
3. see ads for products I'd never buy, and find the whole subject a little disturbing (adult diapers for example)

The key would be choice; if the video came with a selection of ads; for example, see any three of a selection and you can watch the video, I could live with it. I would be a whole lot more likely to actually pay attention to the ad, too - much more effective for the advertiser. I'd also be much less likely to boycott the product because the ad is so obnoxious, like I do now for some products.
Basing the ad I see on my demographics wouldn't be nearly as effective as giving me a choice, particularly because I have eclectic tastes, and often lie to those privacy destroying personal profile questionaires.

Free TV? I don't call paying $50 to $100 a month for cable or satellite free. If it gains enough deptch (amount of content) and breadth (number of subscribers), this distribution model could be the death of cable and satellite TV, or at least launch a price war in base subscription prices.

One problem the cable operators have is they generally can't put too many ads into the feed, so they have to recoup their distribution costs (and license fees paid to the channels) in the subscription price.

This model presumably eliminates per-channel license fees (since distribution is per-episode), and pushes most of the cost of distribution onto the ISPs and end-users who pay for the bandwidth used. Per-episode royalties would have to come from the advertisers. Since the objective is to allow distribution on peer networks, there isn't going to be a reliable mechanism to charge the end-users for each download. Bottom line is that the profit margins for shows distributed via this mechanism are much higher than

I can see two main downside risks:
1) Someone will eventually hack the technology and develop a reader that lets you FFwd the commercials.
2) Once the technology is hacked, it could be possible to inject malicious content into the ad stream. This is especially true if someone in Hiro decides to use the forced ad viewing mechanism to force users to pay a per-episode fee to view the download (for example, opening a browser window for credit card information and then having the ad server set a flag to authorize viewing). Then you not only get trojan and spoofing attacks but also phishing attacks that simulate the ad server screen.

I now watch all my TV via commercial DVD's. With no ads, full length episodes, and often at less than one dollar per episode, they are the best deal for me.

Since this price includes manufacturing, packaging, distribution, etc, it seems that TV shows could be sold online for far less and still generate a profit.

Yet online TV shows currently cost more and that just encourages piracy. Content providers need to learn to stop fighting their customers and concentrate on serving their needs.

ISP's learned to adopt a flat, relatively cheap access fee in order to maximize their profits. Content providers will eventually do the same.

David

With more and more ads EVERYWHERE, I (and many other people) are suffering from ad-burnout. Ads on TV are 33-40% of the show. The worse part is that it's the same God-damned mindless ad repeated 4-10 times within the same hour. (And by "ad" I mean the annoying "K-TEL"-types)

Producers have to realize that they have to bring down production costs and especially their "cut" down.

In a few years, these greedy people will have reached 50+% ads to content ratio. At that point I speculate that people will start to revolt by creating their own content.

I can't believe how stupid these ideas of non-skippable commercials are, particular for internet content and when they make the lame argument that it is to "pay the producer." Yeah, right.

I have no problems paying the producer (and even the distributor). Only, I'd prefer to do it directly and avoid the noise and time suck. I often go to BlockBuster or online DVD rentals precisely to get series without commercials. I'd pay a membership fee to do the same with a video stream. Providing they had no commercials.

The only commercials that catch my attention are previews of movies or other shows. I might stop my DVR to watch. I explore the extra sections of my DVD rentals and usually view the previews.

All other commercials annoy the hell out of me. They have a negative effect rather than positive. I would prefer to pay the producer and distributor directly, rather than suffer through the lies and hype of commercials.

Back in the early 1980's when cable television first came to our town, that was the promise: no commercials. It turned out to be a lie, as commercials increased not only by channel count, but even within a given channel. (I was recording "The Wire" from BET; they stretch an hour HBO show into 90 minutes... a full 1/2 of commericals.)

I like my CM SKIP button on my DVR remote from Panasonic, purchased because it did not milk me with a service fee like TiVo, Microsoft, or Comcast's DVR and didn't buckle under to political pressure to do away with the CM SKIP feature. I would love my CM SKIP button even more if it could be set to 30 seconds instead of 1 minute, because I'm always overshooting my show's resumption from a commercial break.

There's never been a piece of copyrighted material that hackers haven't gotten around. you can copy dvds, hddvds, get all the sat channels around the world for free, download windows xp/vista...you get the idea. it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to hack hiro, if it becomes popular enough to hack. till then there's always tvtorrents.com - there's a lot more people out there downloading shows than you think. the real value will be the program that automatically downloads and catalogs all your favorite shows the moment they hit the web.

Before DVRs, people often avoided commercials by simply changing the channel or muting the audio. TV features like picture-in-picture, last channel return, and return to channel in 30/60/90 seconds helped with this.
I use the same technique on the Internet when I encounter video with mandatory pre-roll commericals. I mute the audio, then do something else in another window for 30 seconds, such as check e-mail, surf the web, etc. No software method could prevent that (without locking up your entire machine). I suppose they could disable mute, but that can easily be circumvented with a hardware or system-level volume control.

You're right. We're going to hate it. But you don't state why.

Let me frame it for you. VCRs and later TiVo revolutionized watching of television. It freed people from the requirement to watch programs on the network's time -- you could do it on your own time. And part of that time shift included the commercials. With VCRs, you could fast-forward, but that still took time. One of my favorite features on my DVD recorder is the CM SKIP button -- it advances the playing time by 30 seconds. A few pops of that, and I save all that wasted time by jumping over the commercials.

Even so, I still watch a handful of commercials from some of my favorite shows. Why? Because a few of them actually interest me.

If Hiro is pitching to the Television producers "We'll force the viewers to watch the commercials" this will fail -- because the viewers will vote with their feet.

I've already seen this phenomenon in a few commercial DVDs (in fact, on at least one DVD produced by PBS) where some clips in the video stream disallow the DVD player to fast forward in order to plug a sponsor. Or DVDs that have a lengthy start-up video before showing the main menu. I hate this. It's as though the producer of the program is tell you that your time is far less valuable than the need to show you something over and over.

Well, I think my time is valuable, as I'm sure others do. Unless Hiro can pick out commercials that are intently focused on my personal situation, I'll have no interested in watching them. And forcing the viewer to watch something he doesn't want to watch will never work. Period.

Look, I don't want to watch commercials generally, and certainly no more than once. In fact, I'll pay not to, and so will a lot of other people. But, make the price fair and geared appropriately to the use case. I do not want to buy very many (if any) TV shows or movies on iTunes or Amazon Unbox.

I will, however, be happy to rent them. And I want to watch them on my TV. Make this easy and cost-effective, and you've got a loyal customer. Say 50 cents to rent a TV show and $1.99 to $2.99 to rent a movie, and you've got me.

And, please, forego the Draconian removal of rented items until I've watched them (as with Amazon Unbox on Tivo, a still-promising alternative).

The disjointed and user-unfriendly world of video and movies on the Internet is frustrating and will not succeed optimally until networks and producers embrace, rather than openly distrust and inhibit, their audience.

I am not sure how many people in America is watching
commercial-supported "free TV".

Most of the people watch TV over cable or satellite, none of them comes cheap. It's not only matter of convenience, better quality picture, sound, a small fraction of TV channels are available for free, off the air.

Watching cable or satellite feels like getting double-charged: paying for the service and subjected to the ads. And it's not simply a matter of choice: most of the programs are not available
off the air.

It isn't clear how the advertisers have any idea how many viewings are taking place when copying and sharing is involved. Presently, counting eyeballs during sweeps is extremely important in determining the price paid by advertisers. If the content can't keep track of viewings and report back when connected to the www you're in a sketchy value situation.

The best part of this system will be the person who hacks it so you can skip the commercials. As a consumer, I believe I have the right to filter the content as I see fit. That includes the commercials.

"I believe I have the right to filter the content as I see fit. That includes the commercials."

Sorry, you don't have any rights with regard to content other than to view it as it is broadcast...Why is it that pirates think they have rights, they are pirates...aaarrrggg!

OK, so let's say I buy into the 'there must be commercials' doctrine. At that point, the discussion becomes, "Which commercials?" How about letting me choose them? And that does not mean collect my buying/browsing choices and throw any old nonsense that gets a keyword hit (Google).



Set up a menu that lets me pick what I want to see. For example, when I am in the market for a car, I want to see car ads before I buy it, not afterward. And I'd like to see ads about the style that I'm interested in. If I'm not going to make a big ticket purchase soon, let me choose home entertainment, or new movie releases, or even funny commercials (my daughter and I get a huge kick out of the drug commercials that usually list side effects worse than the disease they supposedly cure ;-).



If the response is that I won't pick the 'right' commercials, then I can only ask the companies sponsoring the commercials, "Why do you want an adversarial relationship with your customers?" The likelihood that I will buy a product is reduced when commercials about it are crammed down my throat (Geico has been removed from my list of insurance alternatives).



Anyone over the age of 10 has figured out the psychology of commercials, which is essentially like talking about yawning. Except that yawning doesn't involve money, or going to a store, or having competing wants/needs. All of which is to say that customer loyalty does not come from slick but still amateurish attempts to brainwash people. It comes from supplying good products and giving consumers the information they need to put them to best use.



If Hiro is out to produce yet another way to push advertisements, they are not likely to affect consumer spending, even if they manage to grab some of the manufacturer spending. But if they give us a mechanism to pull advertising, then they may be onto something big.



Later . . . Jim

They would kill the product for savvy users if the commercials are unskippable.

However, if you had a "skip 10 seconds" button and the commercials were, say, 30 seconds long, actual engaged viewing of commercials would go up!

Since I got a DVR, I watch more commericals than I did before. I used to get up and walk away or read something during commercials and saw virtually zero commercials. Now I stay glued to the TV to watch the recorded program and with the 15 second skip I get little flashes of commercials. If something is interesting or compelling, I rewind and watch it. If the commercial is somewhat entertaining (the superbowl effect), it will often be watched several times.

Sometimes my kids will even record a "good commercial" and show it to several people of the next few days.

No skip would be stupid. Partial skip would be very smart indeed.

The advertisers get their money from all of us via Walmart's cash register. Since we consumers are the ones paying for the volume-pumped obnoxious commercials we shouldn't be forced to watch them too.

I'd rather pay for content than suffer through ads. I'll buy a DVD or watch a movie on HBO or Encore without ads, but I will ignore the same film on AMC: they jumped the shark when they added commercials. The only ad-supported TV I watch is The Daily Show, because it's worth it.
On the Web, I already use a Hosts file to block advertising servers, so I get to read the news without seeing most of the banner ads. I wouldn't need to find a way to block the ads in a HiroTV program: somebody else would find it for me.

Sounds to me like a new challenge the hackers will jump on top of. To them, it's just a new mountain to be climbed.

But then... oh, wait. I never watch anything on the local stations and those "major networks." So why should I care? If there is a good TV series of interest, I wait for the DVD release, and see it uninterrupted, nothing chopped out to make room for more commersh garbage, and complete to the last line of credits.

If unwanted trash begins to encoded into DVDs, that's the end. I will not acquire, rent, or even attempt to watch any such programming.

end of discussion!

-- js

Hey Cringe, ENOUGH with the TV stuff, already! How about some NEW topics now? Mmm . . . OK?

"In Hiro's case the commercials are not only difficult to remove, they are difficult even to skip or fast-forward through."

I bet they won't be that difficult to remove, and I know they will be incredibly easy to ignore. This is being played on a PC, remember ? Commercials start, hit mute, go surf for a couple of minutes.

But I don't really care. I haven't watched anything on broadcast TV in 2 years, and probably never will again. Last thing I tried, I found myself entirely outraged at the whole concept of my viewing being interrupted by ads. I think this is the TV companies basic problem, most of their next generation of couch potatoes have the same reaction.

It occurs to me that the solution here might be to get rid of the plural.
Have an advert instead of adverts.

If we remember the lesson we learned from Google, a single well targeted advert is considerably more valuable that several un-targeted adverts.

If I was faced with quality production shows and only needed to sit through 20-30 seconds of advert that was totally relevant to me, I might not bother to try to circumvent that.

What if I could actually provide keys words to suggest the range of things I was interested in?




The next trick should be to have the TV player on my PC remember the links etc. associated with my well targeted adverts, so that when I go "Ahhh, must get me one of them" but continue viewing my program because I don't like to interrupt my relaxation time, I didn't need to write anything down and could always go back later and easily actually get-me-one-of-them.

Placing the revenue stream issues aside for a moment, I suggest that better production values for ads could turn the tide on this one. Create commercials that folks want to watch... and preserve...
Content gets a boost and we viewers get memorable ad-art.

I enjoy good commercials. My view is there isn't much difference between the pixels in an ad or a film. We just need to work on the redeeming value to make them both worthwhile.

I don't mind repeatedly viewing clever, tasteful commercials targeted on my interests. In the fifty years I have been watching television, maybe ten have met these criteria.

Companies spend millions of dollars on commercials trying to persuade people to buy their products. In response, the potential customers pay TiVo so tht they can avoid the commercials. Talk about a flawed business model!

it's hard to see how, by any stretch, bringing more commercials to the net is saving the world, and not the opposite.

This sound like it builds on DRM. As such it's doomed to fail. The only way to get some revenue from Internet-TV is to create something file-sharers will keep intact by choice.

Here's some models

1. Subscription based podcasts of episodes. Fans will pay.
2. Metadata links in media. Product placements that link to webshops. Links to DVD-boxes. Events, anything. The key being that it's unobtrusive anything else will be edited out by the p2p-crowd.

I'd pay a small fee to download the TV shows of my choosing.

If I was a network I'd supply the download of a torrent for a small fee and maybe even some seeds.

Here is Australia we are typically anywhere from 1 month to 3 months behind the US when airing shows.

Australian networks pay big dollars for packages of shows, some worth showing, Heroes, Ugly Betty, others that never see the light of day.

This delay is a double edged sword for local networks, they can see which shows are worth screening and how much they can charge local advertisers for ads. One the other hand everybody I know was already up to date with Heroes before the first show was shown locally.

A couple of years ago Lost was in the same boat, but not that many people had the capacity or the knowledge to download it (I had people begging me for episodes). Now most people I know have the capacity to download shows and encode them to a dvd.

Anything, ANYTHING, but commercials!

What can be learned from the model of cable/satellite TV?

HBO's The Sopranos has no commercials and instead HBO is paid some tiny percentage of what consumers are paying to the cable/satellite companies.

What if... easier said than done... a basic Internet package was like a basic Cable package. $X a month for a host of free channels, some with commercials, some without, and for a little more, one can pay for commercial-free content channels.

No business model that includes commercials has a chance in hell. We already have lots of commercial-free options: Netflix, HBO, DVR, DVD. Why would we turn the clock back fifty years?

I think it is very very true. The broadband is a one way of distribution. There is one Indian company called Rajshri Media (P) Ltd. who has shown bollywood the to distribute their content via internet medium in a legal way. I am based in finland and I visit this website www.rajshri.com regularly.

It is not surprising that they would push for such obscenities as forced interstitial ads, but presumably, whatever their technology, they probably rely on a variant of existing standard codecs with a different file extension and something at the ad insertion points, and once opensource projects like VideoLan figure it out, presumably they will support these formats with no forced ads, and presumably easy conversion to standard codecs, maybe even losslessly by largely simply changing the headers and file extension, but removing whatever codes fetches the ads from the Net. Or tools that allow cutting along the keyframes, which the ads would have to start and end with. A bit like the set of lossless jpeg editing tools in jpegtran, like jpegcrop.

The video I watch most often and have sent to many friends is an ad for women's leather coats and I am neither a woman nor interested in a leather coat. But the ad is so clever that it is very entertaining. "Woman In A Bar", probably available on YouTube.

The video I watch most often and have sent to many friends is an ad for women's leather coats and I am neither a woman nor interested in a leather coat. But the ad is so clever that it is very entertaining. "Woman In A Bar", probably available on YouTube.

I'm not entirely sure how well consumers will take to this approach. Part of the appeal of getting one's TV from the Internet is the flexibility is provides. Surely any system that forces you to watch adverts will also prevent you from skipping around the video file and jumping to a particular point of your choosing.

I'm not entirely sure how well consumers will take to this approach. Part of the appeal of getting one's TV from the Internet is the flexibility is provides. Surely any system that forces you to watch adverts will also prevent you from skipping around the video file and jumping to a particular point of your choosing.

Targetted ads is fine, but what is a targetted ad? I'm a middle-aged male so ads for great big SUVs would feature high on my list; however I'm also an environmentalist and will soon switch off if I'm forced to watch too many of those. Targetting should account for all my tastes though I bet the desires of the companies with deep pockets will over-rule my user model.

But why such incessant advertising in the first place? I don't understand why this world has gone the way it has. Everybody has to get freakin' rich or die trying. Under the current social and economic architecture, money ultimately gets made by destroying some part of the environment - mining, industry, fossil fuel r&d, exploration, extraction, processing and burning by consumers. And the list goes on. Not all ways of making money destroy the environment though most do. So why do we have to have advertising everywhere since it ultimately means forcing us to consume. The science of advertising has developed at about the rate of the science of getting a robot on mars. They know how it works and they know how to make people buy. This is all wrong and I don't support advertising full stop. Advertising where I can't fast forward it would peep me right off.

I'm not alone but we are certainly in the minority unfortunately. So no doubt this venture will succeed but if I had a vote on the preferred model, this would not be it.

I actually don't mind the commercials on broadcast TV, as you say, they pay for the show. What rubs me the wrong way is paying for cable or satellite service and getting more commercials than on broadcast networks! Only the so called prime networks are commercial free during the shows, even if they do show you plenty in between. My complaint is with the others such as AMC, etc, for which you do pay extra, and then have to watch the commercials. This is double taxation!! Let's throw the tea in the harbor.

I've been testing the "Joost" beta for the last few days, and it has a similar ad model - you get a quick 1-2 second "This program brought to you by..." at the start, and then at various points in the program it'll play an ad.

Joost is a peer-to-peer service, so, if you've watched it before it'll play from your local machine, else it'll stream it down (if you have the bandwidth).

You can also fast-forward the program if you want, but ads cannot be.

Why are we not allowed to fast forward the adds, if the targeting is right and the length reasonable, and the content up to that of the program people will watch them. Just look at the adds that are posted on YouTube that get thousands of hits.

I like you Bob and many of your readers use a PVR to watch broadcast TV and yes I skip the irrelevant ads.

Do advertisers really want disgruntled customers who wont by their products because they have been forced to watch their add a dozen times?

I have a slightly different commercial model.

The ads are hosted on my own site and I give links to an 'ever-green' copy of an ad, (in PDF, audio or video format, of whatever size and length is required by the material itself.)

I charge the advertiser $3.00 per unique download of those ads. If and when they are downloaded you KNOW that the audience member who downloaded the ads are is pre-qualified and interested. (I also get rid of 'click-through' fraud problems since every transfer is tagged with the destination IP address.)

I then have a segment of my podcast where advertisers can pay for 'reminder' personalized ads, which links to the full ad, at $30.00CPM.

Since these are podcasts, the show episodes are 'evergreen' as well, and subject to the same IP tagging.

This model just recognizes the difference between broadcasting, where an ad is either seen by someone receptive at that very moment or its a waste of the advertiser's money, and podcasting, where the material's ability to persist means that an ad is 'evergreen' and can be effective for an unlimited amount of time.

-Charles-A.

I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention the 8000-pound elephant in the room, iTunes video downloads. I've been purchasing episodes of several TV shows off of it recently just to time-shift and enjoy them without commercials. If this proposed new system ALSO had a way to pay a nominal fee to avoid the embedded commercials completely, I'd be happy.

Personally I've always been extremely uneasy that from the very beginning web-content appeared to users to be free! free! free! and totally unlimited, while behind the scenes the reality is that much of the content's creation and transmission is tremendously expensive for the providers. I'm thinking particularly of professional news organizations, and for example the struggle for survival of something like Salon. As newspapers are being slowly driven under by something like the Wild Wild West of Craig's List, I wonder if the trade-off is worth it in the long run.

I have a slightly different commercial model.

The ads are hosted on my own site and I give links to an 'ever-green' copy of an ad, (in PDF, audio or video format, of whatever size and length is required by the material itself.)

I charge the advertiser $3.00 per unique download of those ads. If and when they are downloaded you KNOW that the audience member who downloaded the ads are is pre-qualified and interested. (I also get rid of 'click-through' fraud problems since every transfer is tagged with the destination IP address.)

I then have a segment of my podcast where advertisers can pay for 'reminder' personalized ads, which links to the full ad, at $30.00CPM.

Since these are podcasts, the show episodes are 'evergreen' as well, and subject to the same IP tagging.

This model just recognizes the difference between broadcasting, where an ad is either seen by someone receptive at that very moment or its a waste of the advertiser's money, and podcasting, where the material's ability to persist means that an ad is 'evergreen' and can be effective for an unlimited amount of time.

-Charles-A.

I actually like ads. Sure, some can be annoying if repeated over and over, but many are entertaining and informative. For example, I saw a commercial for Hayley Westenra back in 2003, and bought her CD after listening to samples on her website. I have since bought her more recent CDs and saw her recently in concert (you could say I'm a bit of a fan :-)). As I don't listen to the radio or read magazines/newspapers I would not have heard of her any other way.

Those people who spend hours hacking their DVD player/media player etc. just to skip a few harmless ads seriously need to get a life.

So, how much did BOB get paid for the NBC "Heroes" tie in I wonder....

I have no problem with TV commercials, but lately it seems every one is pitching prescription medication for male enhancement or some STD of some sort.


What is the point in that? I think those advertising dollars would be better spent in medical trade journals, or shows that are specifically targeted at doctors.


I recently saw the same ad play three times during one break and at least once for each break during the show. No wonder people are gravitating away from traditional TV.


I have taken the attitude, that if I see or hear an ad for a product that catches my attention, I will intentionally find a similar product made by a competitor and buy it instead.


Exo

Okay, I don't watch any TV at all. Not even on the web. I highly recommend this approach, but I know it's not going to work out that way any time soon -- if ever again. Why? Because it's painfully obvious in conversation that so very few people are TV-Free. Even moreso if you don't watch.

So you're right! Even though the reasonble thing to do is drop the TV, drop anything with DRM, etc ... ain't nobody going to.

Everything gets cracked.

It seems pretty naive for Hiro to think they wont be.

Remember that phone service provider, overseas, that allowed free unlimited long distance as long as users were willing to be interrupted with comercials. Huge at first, but now it's gone. And no one has revived that business plan. The same thing's gonna happen when Hiro kicks in. No one will put up with it when there's so many alternatives.

I don't think they should aim it for people like me who are already using Bittorrent for TV shows because; Why would you choose a file that has comercials over a file that doesn't?

However I can see this working if the shows are easily accessed via something like ITunes or an individual TV channel (e.g.NBC) website and the files are better quality and the connection is faster and easier.

Then they could get it to work with Apple TV or XBox 360/Sony Playstation3, new Tivo etc it might just work for the mainstream. Something that doesn't require a computer, but is simply a Net entertainment device.

Therefore they could have business model of (buy a show without comercials or get it for free with).

That's how I expected TV to go for a while now however ultimately they still need to get round the problem that it's not a broadcast medium and the net isn't fast enough to be used this way. I also don't see any of the technologies working without the big players joining forces to create an automatic peer-to-peer network like Bob's prev article. However I can't see that happening.

I love my PVR / Satellite combo. One big improvement would be the ability to download shows at will (like Hiro), though losing the ability to skip over commercials would cheeze me off big-time.

I think the most fascinating aspect of this is the paradigm shift involved in the concept of "piracy". With this new system sharing creative content becomes a positive.

I believe systems that harness people's natural inclination to promote what they like will be the most successful. It's 70-percent about changing corporate attitudes on sharing media ("piracy"), and 30-percent about finding the revenue angle that continues to allow businesses to make a profit.

I'm intrigued to see how well this works.

I agree with John about the distribution thing. This will work great if coupled with something like iTunes where you can download it with commercials for free, or without commercials for a few bucks. Give users a choice.

Also, I have a hard time seeing how they would be able to change the commercials when an Internet connection is not available. Either the download is going to be excessively large - so the player can choose between commercials distributed with the movie - or the player will have to download the commercials all the time (e.g. download them in the background, and play them when the user tries to play a movie).

But yes - it is likely a good idea overall, and a good way of aligning how NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX work and how they could work with the Internet.

From Hiro's website

"File-sharing? Free content is great, but it is also illegal, complicated, unsafe and does not generate any revenue for the content owners"

- Complicated? I don't think so. More like "super-easy", I'd say.
- Unsafe: Again, I don't think so. In fact, forum based use of eMule is about as safe as it gets on the internet.
- Illegal: yes. Simple solutions: make it legal, thank you.

What is left to explain why File-Sharing is not fine? Oh, yes: revenue for the content owners.

Well, there is a super simple solution here too, one that has been repeatedly asked for by many parties: LET US PAY FOR P2P, and share the revenue between the content owners.

I'm pretty sure people would easily pay 7$ per month for being legally able to download anything they want from p2p networks. They already pay such flat-fees in some countries, even higher ones, if you think about it (yearly "subscription" to national tv in UK or ITaly, for instance).

If you calculate 500 million people paying 100$ per year, that adds up to 50 billion per year, enough to support all the involved industries, including the music industry (before someone starts yelling "it's not enoguh" please consdider that other revenue streams would still be in place: people will still go to theatres, concerts etc).

I watch commercial TV. When a commercial comes on, I switch to PBS and make note of the time. 2 minutes later, I switch back.

I pay a cable bill. Let them share that.

I was thinking it would be possible to put ads up on someone's retina from inside their eyeball. Then they'd be forced to view ads all the time! Let's get on it!

Tired of ads everywhere I go. The two that irk me the most:

Ads before a movie at the theater (Uh...I just paid 20 bucks to see this movie - popcorn, soda, and stub - and you're going to show me commercials!?)

Ads in my dinner menu (Why? Good Lord, why? You should pay me to eat here if I have to read these ads.)

We don't have broadcast nor cable where we live in the Santa Cruz mountains above Silicon Valley. And we decided not to have a sat dish.

We *do* have a 2.4G DSL class wireless internet connection - and we buy content from iTunes. And we rent DVDs from NetFlix.

No commercials, and we prefer it that way. We do not support the "commercial-based" biz model AT ALL.

We will however part with money to buy content - which we can watch more than once.

Commercial TV on the internet complete with tracking and recording of what the user is watching in order to show targeted ads. Sounds awful! I want just two things from the television I watch:
1) Start and stop the show whenever I want.
2) Have NO commercials.

Yes, I am willing to pay, by the show, for this. In fact, I already do. I watch at least half of my TV shows on DVD from Netflix.

BTW, I'm skeptical the commercial protection will be that robust. You can always grab and re-digitize the signals going to the monitor and snip the commercials out. This can be automated, and once an altered copy is uploaded it's available to all... unless we go back to suing people.

Did someone kidnap Bob and write his column this week? Or was Bob doing a little 4/20 "celebrating" when he wrote the article?

Bob has said many times in the past and i am going to reiterate it. If you make the content Convienent, and Legal "most" (not all) will use it. If I can go to NBC.com and download Heroes, Fast and Legal, I will watch the commercials. If I had the choice of hunting for a working torrent of the show and going straight to NBC.com, I would pick NBC.com because I like most people value convienent content. Torrent files are not convienent, I might get the new episode today, maybe tomorrow, next friday, or perhaps never. As nice as BT is in concept in real life it kinda sucks....

That's a lot like the magazine marketing model. Everyone knows that not only me, but everyone else in the house reads the magazine I subscribe to, so they tell the advertisers to expect four, or five, reads of their advert per copy. That's why subscriptions are so low...they aren't in the business of selling the magazine, they're in the business of selling the advertising space and getting it out to as many people as possible.

Essentially, what the content producers want is a trade: they provide entertainment, and we watch commercials so they can make money. There is no reason that this commercial watching must interrupt the show every few minutes. That's just how things are done now.

Why can't a person watch all the commercials first to earn credit? They could make the commercials interactive to prove that a human is paying attention. Perhaps there would be other ways to earn credit, such as filling out a survey or spending three minutes browsing a company's website. Or, a person who doesn't want to do that could simply buy credits.

Interrupting the show frequently is one of the worst possible ideas, speaking as someone who enjoys watching shows with no breaks.

would consumers be willing to pay a flat monthly fee that gets divided up based on the time spent watching or listening to different media? obviously, it would need to be optional. the entity that collected and distributed the money would need to be transparent and non-profit. and how many people would need to participate and how much a month would they need to pay to make it interesting to the creators? any interest in this?

Do you really think that people will not be able to Rip/edit/torrent media delivered under this model?