21–30 of 116 posts
No. I would not do that. Advertisements are just distractions. Paying a reasonable amount for reasonable conditions (like no available way to recall or restrict media) and high quality would be a better and viable option for me
I guess one of the issues here is localisation. If you insert a commercial in a video then everyone, everywhere needs to watch that same commercial. Also, commercials tend to go stale. You want to switch commercials based on season or even current affairs. This doesn't allow you to do that, T.V. and streaming video does. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it but I think these are two major issues potential advertisers w…
It's actually easier to skip ads while watching downloads.
I'd rather skip the ads and just pay some money directly for the shows I like and want to encourage to continue. Because I don't want to be tracked, I'd prefer bitcoin.
Don't Bitcoin's encode all transactions that they have been used for into the coin? Unless you use some intermediary to launder your payment bitcoin provides the ultimate in publicising your spending. And if you use an intermediary they'll be tracking your transactions.
Content middlemen: you've lost. The 21st century has no place for you. Distribution is now dirt cheap and dirt simple. You can't add any value because you don't solve any hard problems. All you've done for the last 10 years is make content harder to pay for.
Content creators: make content, add it to your website, charge $2 (or whatever) for a DRM-free download, and enjoy money forever. People will pay you for making things if you let them. No, you won't get a billion-dollar lump sum just for coming up with an idea. Sorry, those days are over too.
(Also, I'm not willing to share my 'net connection with big companies. You have money, buy your own bandwidth.)
I can see the message already: "The torrent you're trying to download is not available in your country" Thank you content industry...
Are they in some DRM'ed format with a player which mandates playing the ads without skipping? No, absolutely not.
It's a null issue anyhow because it's not on the table. Everybody wants to stream you stuff so you can't keep it, and can't accidentally derive any unanticipated value from it. I honestly have no idea what would get people to give up the idea of streaming stuff to you.
I don't know what the situation in the states is right now, but in the UK the majority of the big channels have Flash-based streaming versions of their shows available online very soon (hours) after they've aired (in the case of the BBC some of the shows are available live). The BBC is publicly funded - so no ads - but ITV and Channel 4, the other big players, do have ads, and most people, anecdotally, have no problem with this given the convenience.
I still download episodes of US shows I or my partner enjoy regularly, but if the networks were to offer these shows on their sites with ads I'd be more than willing to watch them there.
For overseas viewers the problem, as other posters have mentioned, is region locking. If the show is sold to overseas markets they cannot then offer the show to viewers in that market. The model needs to change and incorporate revenue sharing with these other markets - but history has shown us these big businesses are unable to do this sort of thing in a timely manner. And that could ultimately be their downfall.
Also I'm not actually going to watch the ads. It's not very hard to skip ahead. So how much can they really be paid for those ads?