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Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

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Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#271

Post by xxpor »

nolok wrote: post #186
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #157

Im enjoying Hulu/Netflix/Prime Video while I can. My kid has grown up in a household without commercials and where you get points for who can hit “skip” the fastest when one does pop up. Commercials were always annoying but when you aren’t used to seeing them then it really hits home that your seeing the exact same commercial for floor wax sixteen times an hour and the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixtee…

> the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour. European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you w…

As an American, what shocked me in the UK was the amount of ads for sports gambling. Literally every commercial during games was for a betting site. It felt pretty gross.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#272

Post by mjburgess »

Razengan wrote: post #263
mjburgess wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word cloud of nonesense ideological boogeymen connected by free-association. In two years time when the death rate on C19 is reported at as-flu levels and the world is in a global depression with massive excess poverty, death, and abuse you'll be ranting then too -- just connecting these to "neoliberal conspiracies" as now. Rather, this will be caused by precise the lack of concern for the economy.

> A word cloud of nonesense The same could be easily said about your comments here, comparing "redistribution of wealth" to genocide.

Not a comparison, an observation. Those societies which tried to create prosperity by redistribution, found there is in fact too little to redistribute. And indeed, therefore, engaged in mass murder to deal with that scarcity.

The same holds today. The GDP of the planet, distributed to all its population is a one-off 20k USD. Not enough wealth for almost anything.

Wealth is about producing over time, and increasing global wealth, ie. decreasing global poverty, is about producing more.

I think the failure to associate such policies with the genocides which underpin them is one of the great educational and moral failures of the 20th C. It hasn't been explained to people that our society is the most moral (by being the richest) in history because people engage in productive activities which provide for their own wealth.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#273

Post by bigbob2 »

RedShift1 wrote: post #195
klausjensen wrote: post #169

I don't pirate because I don't want to pay for content - I pirate because it is the only way I can get a lot of content. I wish there was a global way to subscribe to and pay for content in a market/app-independant way. If you are not in the USA, Canada or UK, your options to pay for the most popular, newest content are very, very limited. And if you are in a very small and/or somewhat impoverished country, forget ab…

I've argued about this numerous times: ISP's need to provide customers with an opt-in p2p license that adds a small fee to their monthly bill. This monthly fee is transferred to a central authority, the ISP does not make any profit from this fee. The license would allow users to torrent whatever content they want. Torrent trackers would be fully legal, their only legal obligation would be keeping track of torrent pop…

It worries me because P2P is a powerful censorship prevention mechanism. Requiring a license to use P2P technologies would mean disallowing much more than just torrents by default. Not only that but lots of illegal content distribution takes place on standard HTTP servers which would presumably not be considered P2P. With that said, disallowing any protocol which is currently allowed today seems like it would open the door for large corporate and governmental interests to disassemble what we know as the open internet. Furthermore it sounds like it would be complicated to deal with ownership of derivative work and resolution of disputes.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#274

Post by elliekelly »

scarface74 wrote: post #130
elliekelly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve recently noticed some Hulu shows that let you know you’ll see ads even if you subscribe to ad-free Hulu.

There are three shows with ads on Hulu without ads. https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#s... The additional shows you can get on demand without Hulu Live TV have ads. But that’s more akin to traditional cable.

How interesting! The list must update with some frequency because I don’t watch any of the shows currently listed in that link yet I’ve encountered the message a handful of times. The three current shows listed are:

- Grey’s Anatomy

- Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD

- How to Get Away with Murder

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#275

Post by mumblemumble »

umvi wrote: post #268
drevil-v2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I am visiting USA, I am flabbergasted at the medication ads on TV. Not just for off-the-counter stuff like paracetamol or anti-inflammation medication but actual freaking prescription only drugs. And they actually ask you to speak to your doctor about the drug. Haha what? Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? And if I don't trust his/her treatment plan…

Playing devil's advocate... doctors are neither omniscient nor perfect. > Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in an imperfect world where sub-optimal choices are made due to time constraints, lack o…

>Playing devil's advocate... doctors are neither omniscient nor perfect.

There's been some research into this subject, and, in this case, it would seem that you are indeed advocating for the devil. I haven't read any of the papers myself, but the stories I've heard via channels such as the Science-Based Medicine blog or PusCast suggest that drug advertising - both to doctors and direct to consumers - tends to result in both higher health care costs and poorer patient outcomes, because it increases the odds that a doctor will prescribe a more expensive and less safe or less effective (or at least no more safe or effective) drug.

It's supposedly down to the drug companies' incentive structures. Once a patent expires, they often start tweaking the molecule to come out with new drugs that behave similarly, but are chemically different enough to qualify for a new patent. They then sink a lot of money into trying to convince doctors to prescribe it instead. Their avenue for doing this is advertising, which doesn't have to clear nearly as high an evidentiary bar as any of the scientific channels for disseminating information.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#276

Post by SanchoPanda »

deathhand wrote: post #240
dataduck wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Google's algorithms have determined that the floor wax company doesn't look at / understand its analytics reports.

I wish it was that intelligent. Ad buyers are morons and companies like Criteo are snake oil salesmen. Advertising, as a whole, is one of the most inefficient use of man-power capitalism has ever created. Intelligent people who have been failed for the US education system(chasing the goal of 'be whatever you want to be... but there is no sustainable way) usually end up there in some fashion. This glut of capable but…

The greatest minds of our generation optimizing for the marginal click instead of studying science, what could go wrong?

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#277

Post by war1025 »

nolok wrote: post #226
wingspar wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty-odd years ago, I saw a tv ad for the drug Paxil. It was about social anxiety disorder. Didn’t know that was a thing, so I never looked into fixing it. Talked to my doctor about it. Got a prescription, took the medication for several years. It changed my life for the better.

That may be a culture difference, and it might not even be entirely healthy (with the god doctor syndrome), but from where I stand your relationship with your doctor and/or his skill was not where it should be if he doesn't regularly ask you the usually basic/boring questions that detect there is an issue to fix, and you don't naturally tell them you feel bad about X or you have this or that issue.

I get a $100 bill minimum any time I step foot in the doctors office. It's not somewhere I'm going to go for casual health questions. There's a fairly high bar that needs to be crossed before I even entertain the idea.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#278

Post by war1025 »

anpat wrote: post #167
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #157

Im enjoying Hulu/Netflix/Prime Video while I can. My kid has grown up in a household without commercials and where you get points for who can hit “skip” the fastest when one does pop up. Commercials were always annoying but when you aren’t used to seeing them then it really hits home that your seeing the exact same commercial for floor wax sixteen times an hour and the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixtee…

Probably because it still earns them money over not showing you anything! I have come to believe that over a period of time producers and consumers both will realise that the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them. Less cynical thoughts; 1. I don’t know if and what kind of controls/flexibility YouTube allows on demand side, but it could be a “foot meet gun” story. ie advertiser is new to platform…

> the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them.

Rational self interest, as they say.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#279

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sho wrote: post #228
msla wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/media/game-of-thrones-season-... > Sunday's episode of "Game of Thrones" notched a series record of 17.8 million viewers, according to HBO. "The Long Night" broke the record set by the season premiere just two weeks ago when 17.4 million viewers tuned in. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/2... > 106 million people watched ‘M.A.S.H.’ finale 35 years ago. No scrip…

> Maybe almost 100 million watched Game of Thrones illegally I think you hit the nail on the head. I live in a country where you can't, to my knowledge, get HBO legally at all, and yet a huge number of people kept up with it, to the point of having a weekly watching party when the series was live. It only takes one tech-savvy person and a USB stick.

This was probably more true a decade ago than it is now. Pirating shows isn't hard, but it's slightly less easy than watching Netflix, so it only matters if the shows on The Pirate Bay are enough better than the shows on whichever streaming service you have to be worth the inconvenience.

There are a lot of good shows on Netflix. Enough that people don't have time to watch even them -- especially now that the Internet is a thing and a lot of the time people used to spend watching TV is now spent watching YouTube or hanging out on Reddit or whatever.

So if you have Netflix and not HBO then you're several times more likely to have watched Stranger Things than Game of Thrones because it was easier to do it. And for the same reason, people don't subscribe to twelve different streaming services, because they don't even have time to watch all the shows on one of them. Which means there's now a lot more fragmentation in what people have watched.

Re: Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

#280

Post by kaybe »

hyperman1 wrote: post #231
slazaro wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Spain we get the worst version of this. Media organizations (the equivalents to MPAA or RIAA) get a percentage of the price of all storage devices (hard drives, flash memory, anything) that are sold, implying that they might be used for piracy. But it's still illegal to pirate! So we're paying for something we MIGHT do, but we still can't do it.

The same is true in Belgium. But i heard there is a strange benefit: You are allowed to copy anything if the source is legally yours at the time of copying. So person A lends some music to person B, person B copies it and returns the original to A. This scenario is legal. The nice thing is person A can be a library. Now if person A makes a copy and gives it to person B, this is illegal, even if the end result is iden…

Same in Germany.
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