Exactly. I think NBA League Pass cuts out the advertising from the local tv networks during timeouts and half time to show the in arena feed (kiss cam, etc). But those are often times ads now as well.
> Only if there was an HBO for sports too. I hate watching those stupid ads when I watch live sports!
Funny, I came here to comment on my distaste for services, such as hbonow, that throw ads in front of paid content. They place ads for their other shows in front of the thing I’m trying to watch (at least, the web service does). I hate it and I am considering dropping my subscription as a result.
I don't really get this sentiment. I get not wanting to see ads that have nothing to do with the service you're using, but I personally have never been upset or revolted at HBO running their trailers for other shows before the show I want to watch. Everyone has their own tastes and to each their own I just wish I could understand the absolute revolt some people feel at even content relevant ads.
Compare with a service like Netflix. Netflix has no ads and let’s me skip past the opening titles with a single click of a button. It’s highly optimized to give me what I want.
HBO not only shows me ads for unrelated content (it’s really never something I’m interested in seeing), but I have to blindly click the timeline when I skip it. If I overshoot, I have to backtrack in search of the first scene. Overshooting again puts me back in the ad. It’s more about what HBO wants me to see than it is about what I want to see.
If you get the individual league streaming services, they often show "Commercial Break In Progress" across a semi-static image with no audio during ad breaks.
I've always enjoyed those quiet ad-free breaks on MLB.tv. This year they've started filling them with loud , annoying, repetitive ads. Starting to wonder why bother paying for the service.
Just treat it like any other timeout that's shown: show the fans, cut to the coaches, cut to the commentators -- call it exclusive content any you're pretty much golden.
You could even have the commentators take a break during tv timeouts, and just have some chill crowd shots. Maybe get some teams on board to show what they'd do on jumbotrons during the breaks in action.
I rarely watch sports events live. Each sport has a fairly predictable timeline. For example, an NFL game is about 3.5 hours of clock time for what's an hour long game (skipping clock stoppage and half-time). So just start watching 2.5 hours after kickoff and you catch up with real time by the end of the game.
The BBC in the UK airs the Superbowl every year, but the BBC is not allowed to show advertisements.
They show the main feed except when ad-breaks happen, at which point they cut to a studio with a host and a couple of pundits who talk about things related to/that are happening in the game.
Works pretty well. We used to get a VPN on and find a US stream to have a laugh at the absurdity of American advertising but these days the Beeb's coverage is more than fine.
Overwatch League handles this by displaying the stats from players as it counts down till it comes back from ads. I like that. I know exactly how long I have, and if I don't have to go anywhere, the stats are still pretty interesting.
It does depend on the sport, but for basketball they could replay interesting plays, talk about players, theorize strategy, broadcast in-stadium fillers, or just show the team talking.
During the Winter Olympics, I tried to figure out what I would have paid NBC for an ad-free experience (I watched as much as I could via CBC, but sometimes I just wanted to watch on TV without the VPN rigeramorale). I came up with $300. I would've paid NBC $300 for two weeks of ad-free Olympics coverage.
The streaming app was almost rage inducing though. Seeing periodic commercials in and of itself wouldn't be that bad. But NBC seemed to have more ad slots than ads, because I kept seeing the same dumb 3 or 4 ads over and over, and many weren't even relevant. There was a Comcast ad that made no sense to show me. I'm not in a Comcast market.
Worse, you basically couldn't forward through an event since it would stop you at an "ad point" and make you watch that ad. You could then forward to the next "ad point" and have to sit through that one. And if you skipped backwards to re-watch something to earlier than the "ad point", it would show the ads again.
By contrast, CBC basically shows you 90 seconds of ads up front, then lets you watch the rest of the event including skipping around ad free.
The NBC app could have used logic like, for every X minutes of program time you watch, you have to watch Y minutes of ads. That would have been okay. But no, the NBC app was basically "we're going to force you to watch these ads" like that episode of Black Mirror.
And BTW, this was for the paid NBC networks as I had to pickup a Sony Vue account to watch anything not on the main network. For the main network, I recorded everything on my Tablo from OTA where I could skip around as much as I wanted.
And that constant bombardment has reduced the effectiveness of advertising as well. So it makes sense that advertising dollars would be distributed differently than they once were.
I don't find myself terribly upset when someone is just ambiently using a product. It's almost more jarring when something set in the current time & place has someone is using a "Banana" computer, with a bite out of the banana, or something like that.
Of course, if the actors actually take a moment to start extolling the virtues of whatever that's a different story.
I agree... mostly... I actually found having the silly little "Skype" logo floating on video calls in shows to be super disruptive, while the symbol on the computer... If it's an apple or dell's square or just blank, then I'll just block it out.
I liked Netflix insofar as they challenged cable networks and studios, but ultimately it was just more TV and I finally recently gave that up too, and it's been an improvement overall.
Everyone and their mother will soon have a streaming service. I predict eventually there will be some streaming conglomerate to allow you to pick and choose streaming providers (Netflix, Hulu, NBC, etc.) with a single sign-on. Right before they package them up as bundles, and we have Cable Company 2.0.
I don't see the value-add there. We already have the common viewer (the browser) and oauth single-sign-on is already widespread -- we don't need a Comcast or any other conglomerate to do that.
Not having to switch between apps for different shows would be very nice. And yes, I'm literally reinventing the cable "guide" experience with silo'd channels.
Apple and others are trying to do this their own way, but nobody has something exhaustive that I know of.
VRV.co does this for a number of online streaming services that have their own apps and content. The cost is much lower than subscribing to each service on its own.
The value-add is convenience in having a single app to deal with on multiple devices, a single login to deal with, a single payment that is fairly cheap when compared to everything individually.
Not just OAUTH. A single provider where I can subscribe and add Netflix, CBS All access, HBO Go, etc. at will, without having to register for each. A single monthly bill. And, it works on my Smart TV, not just a browser.
Incidentally I'm pretty annoyed that Amazon has started running promos for other content in front of the content I selected. I pay for Prime, I don't want to see ads. Even Amazon's.
Why do I need to intervene to avoid the crap you're throwing at me?
More precisely, if you threw a water balloon at someone's computer in the office, does the fact that they could have moved their computer make it so that the water balloon throwing never happened?
Do you not wander around your apartment, performing other tasks, while watching shows? It's difficult to skip an ad when your hands are full of pancake batter - or when you're standing across the room, to have a smoke out the window.
YouTubers get a lot more money for their product placements than they do for their views. Hell, almost universally all the Tech tubers did promos for Dyson's new battery powered vacuum. YouTubers don't get a direct benefit for you being a Red member, they're not salaried, and I'd hazard a guess that there are a signifigant fewer amount of Red subscribers than there are subscribers who just use adblocks. Personally no matter the amount of content YouTubers put out I could never justify myself paying YouTube directly for the privilege of not having to use an adblocker on their site.
I don't watch much TV or streaming services but I do appreciate a funny advertisement[1] when I see it. Granted it never makes me want to purchase the product.
I wonder if Netflix or Amazon prime will try to introduce advertising. I notice that they are sometimes inserting ads in the beginning of a movie/episode, but so far only to promote their new show offerings.
Thank goodness. We have the Internet. Distribution of content is no longer a task worth a kings ransom. A clever 12 year old can do it in their spare time. These 'professionals' who fall on their face time and time again trying to resurrect their antiquated system which is based solely on the difficulty of getting content from A to B should have been eliminated a decade or two ago. Let us see how well they like capitalism now.
>Even marquee cable TV shows like The Walking Dead are having trouble holding onto viewers.
You can't cite that, The Walking Dead has story and writing problems outside of general TV viewership declines.
I really hate advertising. There's a lot of investment in human psychology, and I sometimes find myself being seduced by a piece of advertising. They really know how to push my buttons.
It's insidious. Even news articles have paid content. Paid placement for TV and movies (Netflix is not immune to this). It's everywhere, and impossible to escape.
For me the most revolting evolution of advertisement was when paid content made it's way into the content of articles, i.e. "The Circular investigates which brand of laundry detergent is best for getting out that wine stain"
But I think down the road a bit we'll find out how much advertising has cost us as a society in terms of lost efficiency, it's an externality just like dumping waste into a public water source except the water source is our brain's attention span.
This is all my opinion, I've never understood cable television. You are paying for someone to provide you with advertisements. Sure, you get a lot of channels and content but how many channels does the average person watch and how often are you just turning on "something" to have on? I've never paid for cable but as soon as Netflix DVD delivery came along I was on board and haven't looked back. Going back to watching television with advertisements is akin to nails on a chalkboard now. Which is odd because I still use free Pandora and have no problems whatsoever with their advertising.
If you're paying for Internet, you're paying for someone to provide with you advertisements in exactly the same way. Cable is merely the delivery method -- the networks and stations themselves are providing the content separately and using advertising to fund it.
If you pay for premium cable channels like HBO then you're actually contributing your money to the production of advertisement-free content.
Except Cable is purely an entertainment-consumption medium. Whereas the internet provides tools and services vastly beyond entertainment including creation of content, goods, and services.
The value-cost ratio is absurdly better on the internet.
That's just progress. At the time cable was deployed, the value-cost ratio was quite a bit better. For many people the Internet is deployed to them on the very same cables that were originally laid just for television.
A lot of people have cable because they've always had cable and now there's a generation of people coming up who've never had it.
It is (or was, I haven't checked recently) very difficult to actually just pay for HBO. I had wanted to get a subscription for a few different shows they offer and every way to get access to them involved paying for cable channel bundles.
I assume cable companies are shoveling money at HBO as fast as they can manage as otherwise it'd be a wise idea for HBO to just begin offering ala carte access to their content and get oodles of free money.
If you're in the US there is HBO Now which is their cable-free subscription service. I believe the actual monthly fees are still being serviced by third parties though, e.g. I pay Apple 15 dollars a month for my HBO subscription, but I get all the content through HBOs website directly.
If it helps you understand, originally cable tv was a way to pay for tv (as opposed to free OTA) that then had no ads, almost like how HBO operates today. Of course, that could only last for so long.
Cable TV was originally a way for communities outside of broadcast OTA TV reception areas to receive TV signals with little signal-degradation. People paid only for the ability to receive channels - not for the channels themselves. Premium TV came later.
Yes. Here's a little historical tidbit: if you have an older TV, you'll need to put your TV in CATV mode in order to watch cable. CATV stands for "community antenna television", referring to the practice of having one antenna to receive OTA TV and then using cable to distribute it throughout the community.
I agree - I was staying in a hotel a few weeks ago, and flicked the TV on. I never really thought about it, but it's probably the first time I've watched TV in about 5-8 years - and the number and frequency of ads was just painful. I couldn't understand who the heck would put up with that!
I'm pretty sure that this is (or should be) a classic example of boiled frog effect.
Your brain is used to the ads so it tunes them out, the advert makers figure out (using the metric of "how many users complain about advert frequency") how to increase them so that users don't notice. Eventually you end up with a fifteen minute advert block every ten minutes, and you're wondering how it got to that level, but you're still invested in this-one-show-that-nobody-else-has, so you put up with it -- your brain tunes it out the rest of the time so you don't really notice it unless you've had a break from TV long enough.
I think that the UK does the right thing. In legislature they mandate that you can have no more than 12 minutes of adverts per hour of television[1]. Apparently in 1980s America a similar agreement was ruled illegal[2]. Sometimes I wonder how the Americans can put up with American courts, given how obviously biased towards corporate interests they are.
It's the sheer volume of advertising, if you ask me. I remember once trying to sit through an old western flick with my grandpa. It felt like it took the entire day but in retrospect it probably was around 4.5 hrs to completion which is still an absurd amount of time. As a result I never paid for cable until it came bundled with the internet recently.
It was indeed that bad, and 20 years ago there were less regulations about advertisement volume so a lot of the ads ran louder than normal programming to make sure the guy who went to go and get his popcorn could still hear about the wonderful effects of fakedrugalenta.
My quick attempt. I'm sure there are better sources of this data.
Let's say an average of 30 hours of consumption per week per person. [1] In a household of 4 people, that's 120 hours per week.
"[Nielsen says the average commercial minutes per hour] was 16 minutes/8 seconds for cable network programming." [2]
Assuming 30 second commercials, that's 32 commercials per hour, or 3,840 impressions per week. Across 30 days, that comes out to be 16,457 impressions.
"$24.76 - The average cost of a thousand impressions for a 30-second commercial in broadcast prime time in 2014, down from $25.06 in 2013." [3]
$24.76 per mille * 16.457 mille views/month/household = $407. That feels unreasonably high. If the CPM were $2, it would still translate to $40/month.
30 hours per person per weeks seems absurdly high to me - that would be one 3 hour program every week-night, two (6 hours) on Saturday and three (9 hours) on Sunday.
I would be really keen to see what some actual values are, and the breakdown by age group.
I've recently moved into a new place and we haven't even wired up the TV arial, and even with a Netflix subscription, it's mainly for the kids shows - and even then we heavily restrict the amount of time they can watch TV.
Consumption for my wife and I now is generally Netflix if they have a show we like, or Plex for specific shows we can't get on Netflix - even then this would top out at _maybe_ a couple of hours a week.
Time on reddit/hn is a completely different story...
Link #1 above has the breakdown by age group, by quarter, going back a number of years. It forms an interesting "fan" shape with the older generations watching more and the younger generations watching much less.
Instead you'd pay for/subsidize shows you don't need... The only true a a-la-carte model is to pay for episodes individually. Which you can do on Apple TV / Amazon.
The price inflation is ridiculous for individual episode purchases. Right now to purchase Jessica Jones season 1 on itunes it will run you $30 for the set or $3 each for thirteen episodes... To contrast netflix costs $9 a month (with the first month free) up here in canada. The prices aren't even close to comparable and people can see that clear BS as plain as day.
Well yea, if, for instance, it cost $6 or so to get the season through itunes then that would be clearly higher but not yet stupid... we're not talking about the price scaling for buying things in bulk, itunes it just asking you to burn money for no reason... It is cheaper to get all of netflix for a month than three episodes of a show on netflix. That price step moves us beyond "more expensive" into crazy land.
It's hard to say without knowing the terms of the agreement between Netflix and Apple. If I were Netflix I wouldn't allow them to sell it for cheaper than me.
That's fair, and there's nothing compelling you (if you were Netflix) to even make them available to Apple to sell. There can absolutely be market reasons to do this, but if you were a farmer with a farm stand next to a grocery store who sold corn for $3 and allowed the grocery store to sell "Corn grown by Touche, also for sale out the door and around the corner for $3" at a price of $200... there isn't anything illegal there, but it's stupid.
You might do this because you get the occasional sale through the grocery market (convenience) and the grocery market would probably be happy to participate if it only had to settle up when an actual sale occurred... but I think reasonable people looking at this situation could all agree that it's stupid.
I don't know how you could be so certain of what the price of a single episode should be. There's so many factors outside of what Apple chooses to price them at. It might even be possible that Apple has no say in how it prices episodes. That is the case (or used to be the case, at least) in the book industry.
Are individual episode prices high or are bundle prices low? Remember that Netflix can sell Jessica Jones Season 1 for so cheap because people who don't care about and will never watch it are paying for it.
I was under the impression that Apple's price would depend on their agreement with Netflix, and would reflect some amount Netflix thought was reasonable. If this were the case, maybe Netflix is trying to drive users towards them? Why would Apple agree though? Because they could possibly profit highly?
The advertisements defray the cost of the thing you are
paying for. If they weren't there, you'd have to pay much
more for it.
Given that cable with ads averages over $100 a month [1] while Netflix without ads charges $14 a month for the most expensive package [2] I think the purported cost savings from having ads are not in evidence.
The corporate argument is that advertising pays for the content while consumers pay for distribution. So the Netflix equivalent is your ISP price (distribution) + Netflix subscription (content).
In practice, media consolidation is just shafting consumers with more ads and service costs... both due to regulations that protect inefficiencies and sheer corporate greed.
Netflix is making a loss, they are burning investment money trying to stake out their territory, that won’t last, expect increases in costs or ads in the future.
While in theory this makes sense the underlying profit motive of the companies being discussed lead me to believe that reality will not conform to the theory. The major cable companies can push upwards of 90% profit margins. If what you posed was true, then wouldn't the cable companies set a maximum percentage for their profit margins (e.g. 30%) and return the gains in the form of reduced cost to the consumers? Additionally, these companies often have their infrastructure subsidized by our tax dollars which further enhances the the actual profits being realized by these companies.
This is only going to increase the cable companies attempts to add more Netflix-taxes to your internet bill. Comcast started it with their bandwidth soft-caps, with $10 per 100gb over 1TB (it was originally 300gb). I'm lucky to be on an isp that doesn't have a cap right now, but I'm sure it's in the pipeline as cable subscriptions fall and advertising dollars decline.
Once the Great Unbundling Event of the 2010s completes, I look forward to the Great Rebundling Event of the 2020s to begin.
But seriously, cable actually did solve a lot of problems. I've never paid for a cable TV subscription, but having to manage multiple services individually is not an ideal solution, either.
Only if its competitors all do this too, and no new competition can fill the gap. Their current business model is profitable, so why resort to something that can only cost you users and risks your current market leader position?
This will happen when all the smart people have moved on and only the less intelligent sales people and accountants are left.
It definitely will happen eventually but then a great ship-jumping will commence again.
I am paying Netflix to provide a service for me, I will stop paying Netflix if that service includes shoving an advertising pipe directly into my brain.
Netflix content has gotten so f&ing boring I'm likely going to cancel my account soon. I'm tired of 500 shows season 1&2. Would much rather prefer 100 shows with season 1-4+. At this point, it's clear they have recruited Hollywoods most seasoned producers, and with it, all the garbage that was already being produced.
I recently switched my family's main TV over from using the OS on the TV (WebOS, pretty good actually, which is why we used it this long) back to good ol' Roku. My youngest heard about this and burst into tears for a good 20 minutes.
Turns out, he thought "Roku" was DirectTV, which his grandparents have. He was sobbing about how on "Roku" shows keep stopping in the middle (ads, I assume), if you turn off the TV the show doesn't stop, and that if you don't watch a show in time, you have to wait weeks to watch it again.
Once I got everything powered up and he saw Netflix, Amazon, et all, he was just fine again.
The "downside" to this is that advertising will switch from the old tv model (buying ads based on which show they'll air during) to buying ads in the internet-way (all the creepy facebook targeting, etc). I'm already managing three of these campaigns, using third party data to buy tv commercials on devices like roku and smart tv apps. So it doesn't matter what show the ad airs on because its targeted to the user (household) who is watching the show.
Its around 5-10x more expensive than normal online video ads right now, but 50x cheaper than normal tv ads. Plus you can actually prove someone made a purchase after seeing an ad.
This is called advanced tv or connected ctv (atv, ctv) if you're looking for more info. Streaming on a pc/mobile is called full episode player (fep) and is similar.
Right now, a third of the TV ads I will see on broadcast are political ads for a candidate that praises the leadership of President Trump. On YouTube, I get ads for the "non-profit" Prager University, which is just full of bullshit.
I personally love that Netflix doesn't have any advertisments, especially polarizing ones.
124 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadPeople don't realize how much dead time is introduced to professional games solely for commercial breaks.
You can ignore a sponsor logo, you can't get that time back.
There are several. HBO itself is one of them. The sports on them are fairly limited, most notably boxing, however.
Funny, I came here to comment on my distaste for services, such as hbonow, that throw ads in front of paid content. They place ads for their other shows in front of the thing I’m trying to watch (at least, the web service does). I hate it and I am considering dropping my subscription as a result.
HBO not only shows me ads for unrelated content (it’s really never something I’m interested in seeing), but I have to blindly click the timeline when I skip it. If I overshoot, I have to backtrack in search of the first scene. Overshooting again puts me back in the ad. It’s more about what HBO wants me to see than it is about what I want to see.
It's gone. :(
I’ve found silent “we’ll be right back” screens to almost be worse than ads in some ways. It’s just a weird feeling.
They show the main feed except when ad-breaks happen, at which point they cut to a studio with a host and a couple of pundits who talk about things related to/that are happening in the game.
Works pretty well. We used to get a VPN on and find a US stream to have a laugh at the absurdity of American advertising but these days the Beeb's coverage is more than fine.
The screen can just show the players milling around, or show the fans, or the announcer can give random factoids.
(they had $900 million+ in ad revenue)
It'd be a fun gimmick if they could figure out a way to auction ad free broadcasts to their viewers.
The streaming app was almost rage inducing though. Seeing periodic commercials in and of itself wouldn't be that bad. But NBC seemed to have more ad slots than ads, because I kept seeing the same dumb 3 or 4 ads over and over, and many weren't even relevant. There was a Comcast ad that made no sense to show me. I'm not in a Comcast market.
Worse, you basically couldn't forward through an event since it would stop you at an "ad point" and make you watch that ad. You could then forward to the next "ad point" and have to sit through that one. And if you skipped backwards to re-watch something to earlier than the "ad point", it would show the ads again.
By contrast, CBC basically shows you 90 seconds of ads up front, then lets you watch the rest of the event including skipping around ad free.
The NBC app could have used logic like, for every X minutes of program time you watch, you have to watch Y minutes of ads. That would have been okay. But no, the NBC app was basically "we're going to force you to watch these ads" like that episode of Black Mirror.
And BTW, this was for the paid NBC networks as I had to pickup a Sony Vue account to watch anything not on the main network. For the main network, I recorded everything on my Tablo from OTA where I could skip around as much as I wanted.
Of course, if the actors actually take a moment to start extolling the virtues of whatever that's a different story.
And smoking. Lots of smoking.
I liked Netflix insofar as they challenged cable networks and studios, but ultimately it was just more TV and I finally recently gave that up too, and it's been an improvement overall.
Apple and others are trying to do this their own way, but nobody has something exhaustive that I know of.
The value-add is convenience in having a single app to deal with on multiple devices, a single login to deal with, a single payment that is fairly cheap when compared to everything individually.
Nope.
More precisely, if you threw a water balloon at someone's computer in the office, does the fact that they could have moved their computer make it so that the water balloon throwing never happened?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaldfjkrHy4
Yes, I have childish humor.
Anecdotally, the $4 more a month I pay Hulu for an ad-free version of their streaming service is the easiest money I spend on any entertainment.
You can't cite that, The Walking Dead has story and writing problems outside of general TV viewership declines.
I really hate advertising. There's a lot of investment in human psychology, and I sometimes find myself being seduced by a piece of advertising. They really know how to push my buttons.
It's insidious. Even news articles have paid content. Paid placement for TV and movies (Netflix is not immune to this). It's everywhere, and impossible to escape.
But I think down the road a bit we'll find out how much advertising has cost us as a society in terms of lost efficiency, it's an externality just like dumping waste into a public water source except the water source is our brain's attention span.
If you pay for premium cable channels like HBO then you're actually contributing your money to the production of advertisement-free content.
The value-cost ratio is absurdly better on the internet.
A lot of people have cable because they've always had cable and now there's a generation of people coming up who've never had it.
I assume cable companies are shoveling money at HBO as fast as they can manage as otherwise it'd be a wise idea for HBO to just begin offering ala carte access to their content and get oodles of free money.
Sadly the HoBOGO is only available up here if you have a cable TV subscription that offers HBO.
Your brain is used to the ads so it tunes them out, the advert makers figure out (using the metric of "how many users complain about advert frequency") how to increase them so that users don't notice. Eventually you end up with a fifteen minute advert block every ten minutes, and you're wondering how it got to that level, but you're still invested in this-one-show-that-nobody-else-has, so you put up with it -- your brain tunes it out the rest of the time so you don't really notice it unless you've had a break from TV long enough.
I think that the UK does the right thing. In legislature they mandate that you can have no more than 12 minutes of adverts per hour of television[1]. Apparently in 1980s America a similar agreement was ruled illegal[2]. Sometimes I wonder how the Americans can put up with American courts, given how obviously biased towards corporate interests they are.
[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8341764/TV-fi...
[2]: ""Many countries regulate the amount of advertising per hour, but a similar industry agreement in the U.S. was ruled illegal in the 1980s."", from: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-02-06/opinion/ct-per...
Also it was one of the main sources of home entertainment.
As was the case with newspapers and magazines for hundreds of years, as well as more and more subscription-based sites today.
The advertisements defray the cost of the thing you are paying for. If they weren't there, you'd have to pay much more for it.
Let's say an average of 30 hours of consumption per week per person. [1] In a household of 4 people, that's 120 hours per week.
"[Nielsen says the average commercial minutes per hour] was 16 minutes/8 seconds for cable network programming." [2]
Assuming 30 second commercials, that's 32 commercials per hour, or 3,840 impressions per week. Across 30 days, that comes out to be 16,457 impressions.
"$24.76 - The average cost of a thousand impressions for a 30-second commercial in broadcast prime time in 2014, down from $25.06 in 2013." [3]
$24.76 per mille * 16.457 mille views/month/household = $407. That feels unreasonably high. If the CPM were $2, it would still translate to $40/month.
[1] https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817
[2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/308248/shorte...
[3] http://adage.com/article/news/costs-ad-prices-tv-mobile-bill...
I would be really keen to see what some actual values are, and the breakdown by age group.
I've recently moved into a new place and we haven't even wired up the TV arial, and even with a Netflix subscription, it's mainly for the kids shows - and even then we heavily restrict the amount of time they can watch TV.
Consumption for my wife and I now is generally Netflix if they have a show we like, or Plex for specific shows we can't get on Netflix - even then this would top out at _maybe_ a couple of hours a week.
Time on reddit/hn is a completely different story...
ESPN, I’m looking directly at you.
But yeah, a-la-carte is always more expensive than bundles. That's true of episodes, or channels, or whatever else.
You might do this because you get the occasional sale through the grocery market (convenience) and the grocery market would probably be happy to participate if it only had to settle up when an actual sale occurred... but I think reasonable people looking at this situation could all agree that it's stupid.
Are individual episode prices high or are bundle prices low? Remember that Netflix can sell Jessica Jones Season 1 for so cheap because people who don't care about and will never watch it are paying for it.
And yet, people bitch about the price of bundles.
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/09/23/average-cable-tv-bill/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/5/16429126/netflix-price-ra...
In practice, media consolidation is just shafting consumers with more ads and service costs... both due to regulations that protect inefficiencies and sheer corporate greed.
Commercial TV is trash.
But seriously, cable actually did solve a lot of problems. I've never paid for a cable TV subscription, but having to manage multiple services individually is not an ideal solution, either.
It definitely will happen eventually but then a great ship-jumping will commence again.
I am paying Netflix to provide a service for me, I will stop paying Netflix if that service includes shoving an advertising pipe directly into my brain.
Turns out, he thought "Roku" was DirectTV, which his grandparents have. He was sobbing about how on "Roku" shows keep stopping in the middle (ads, I assume), if you turn off the TV the show doesn't stop, and that if you don't watch a show in time, you have to wait weeks to watch it again.
Once I got everything powered up and he saw Netflix, Amazon, et all, he was just fine again.
Its around 5-10x more expensive than normal online video ads right now, but 50x cheaper than normal tv ads. Plus you can actually prove someone made a purchase after seeing an ad.
This is called advanced tv or connected ctv (atv, ctv) if you're looking for more info. Streaming on a pc/mobile is called full episode player (fep) and is similar.
I personally love that Netflix doesn't have any advertisments, especially polarizing ones.