Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html

by ctoth • 8 years ago

152 111 8 years ago

dtech• 8 years ago

Apparently, Betteridge's law of headlines doesn't always hold up.

On a more serious note, it will be interesting to see if currently, ad-free on-demand services will undergo the same transition.

radicaldreamer• 8 years ago

I could see a dual tier approach like Hulu. The ad supported tier is only $5 a month

pacala• 8 years ago

Of course they will.

wnevets3• 8 years ago

Netflix is rumored to start advertising between episodes

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/22/how-to-opt-out-of-new-ad-tes...

endorphone5• 8 years ago

They are pushing their own programming (trying to encourage consumption of the programming that you already have access to and already paid for). I don't think it's fair to the conversation to compare it with the umbrella of commercial endorsements.

giancarlostoro2• 8 years ago

It's not a rumor, they already do this. At least when you watch their original programs you see ads for more of their original programs. Thankfully you can skip them, they just try to show a trailer for one of their own shows / movies basically.

Edit:

I usually see it during the phase where Netflix is about to autoplay another episode, it tries to show it through then, I usually skip it cause it's stupid, I don't want to be fed the same trailer 500 times...

chipperyman573• 8 years ago

Possibly, Hulu already does this and Netflix is rumored to start doing it soon.

However, an important difference between old TV and current-day streaming is that it is much easier to pirate shows that are streaming. There is an (ad-)free alternative to Hulu and Netflix that is becoming easier to use. At some point, streaming services may have to compete by not including ads.

jlg232• 8 years ago

However, an important difference between old TV and current-day streaming is that it is much easier to pirate shows that are streaming.

As someone who grew up recording (and distributing to friends) one-to-many streams (a.k.a. terrestrial TV), I wonder how it got easier. Just because nobody is using personalized watermarks to prove copyright infringement yet, does not mean a redistributor today ain't going to get sued tomorrow.

kbenson• 8 years ago

Hulu/Hulu Plus always advertised. I was very excited a year or two ago when they finally offered ad-free streaming for an additional few dollars.

codezero• 8 years ago

Amazon Prime includes “ads” for their own shows. I call them ads because they are on before the show I’m watching and I don’t want to watch them. Luckily, for now, I can still skip them.

isostatic2• 8 years ago

I thought I noticed that on an Amazon fire. It doesn't happen on my lg tv though.

sjg0073• 8 years ago

So does HBO..

yuhong5• 8 years ago

The entire debt-based economy is based on extracting more money from consumers. Worth mentioning is this is not long after stagflation occurred in the late 1970s. As a side note, I have a strong feeling that in large corporations like Google expenses always tends to increase with revenue. One example would be housing and salaries, but there are probably others.

al_chemist• 8 years ago

What does "debt-based" have to do with extracting money?

yuhong5• 8 years ago

The current economy allow creation of an almost infinite amount of debt and has since at least 1971 I think. It should be obvious how such an economy incentivize extraction, one of the most obvious being credit cards.

walrus01• 8 years ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/consumer-debt-is-set-to-reac...

https://www.creditkarma.com/studies/i/average-debt-american-...

hammock• 8 years ago

When money is easy, the incentives switch to increasing consumption, rather than investment in increasing productivity. Why spend time and money inventing a better mousetrap when you could just buy ten more of them?

The principle applies at every level of the economy (individual, corporate, government etc)

jimmaswell• 8 years ago

This is strange. I've consistently heard that it was a total myth cable was ever ad-free.

jasone• 8 years ago

I distinctly recall the ad-free experience of my cousin's cable service circa 1980, in stark contrast with the broadcast reception my family had. I can't definitively say that there were no commercials on the channels we didn't bother with, but in essence it was certainly a commercial-free viewing experience. This was in the Denver area. By the early 90s things like home shopping network channels and infomercials were increasingly common, and we eventually ended up with common disruptive commercials. Perhaps your "myth" sources are too young to have actually experienced the early days of cable.

mixmastamyk• 8 years ago

Around that time we had the Showtime channel and there was not (and still no third-party advertising?).

Of course when the "basic cable" started a few years later, for example MTV, those channels always had commercials.

gitgud• 8 years ago

Australian cable (Foxtel) was ad-free until 2000-ish if anyone can remember?

MetallicCloud• 8 years ago

I had Austar around that time, and it was kind of ad free. They advertised other shows on that channel, and sometimes other channels, but there wasn't any ads for products. But I remember around the early 2000's that started to change.

guidoism• 8 years ago

Not the US, but in Bolivia in the late 90s cable was essentially ad free. My favorite channel was "The Sony Channel", they had stuff like Dawson's Creek (don't judge!) and Seinfeld ad free. Because those shows had spots for commercial breaks they stuck music videos in between. Ok, maybe that isn't completely ad free, the music videos were essentially ads for Sony's music artists, but it was better than regular commercials.

flyinghamster• 8 years ago

I remember the early-1980s cable landscape, when the only "cable" channels were what we could call premium channels now: HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, etc.; all the other channels were local over-the-air stations.

icedchai• 8 years ago

We got cable in 1981 and it was exactly this. None of the “cable” (premium) channels had ads. Some of them, like Nickelodeon, did add ads in the late 80’s.

copperx• 8 years ago

I remember asking my mother "what is cable TV?" when I was a kid and I still remember she said, "It's when you pay for TV so you don't get ads." This must have been 30 years ago.

InclinedPlane• 8 years ago

The internet didn't used to have ads or spam either.

tracker1• 8 years ago

Relatively speaking, most of the time the internet has been around, spam and ads have been around. Spam on nntp predates the web, iirc. Bots in the messenger apps were unforgivingly ruthless, and email has had spam at least since the early 90's.

Also, even shows that did have ads, it wasn't nearly as much. If you look at say Buck Rogers, iirc it's about 48 minutes per episode with credits, and back then they didn't share space for credits with ads. Today a lot of shows are as little as 34-38 minutes to an hour of programming. That's 30-40% of your viewing time being advertising. Not to mention product placement and other ad channels in the content.

Not to mention the crap that's happened to youtube that's made it hard to follow/watch channels with content you want to follow in favor of engagement algorithms. It starts to suck pretty badly all around. The last update to my Nvidia Shield TV brought ads into youtube there too, where there weren't any until a few weeks ago.

My GF uses Hulu's "live tv" services, which aren't bad, but still have all the ads, are painful. I'd still rather use torrents, even if I am paying for content.

jdofaz3• 8 years ago

My gym has guideless basic cable on the cardio machines. Anytime I channel surf I would estimate more than 50% of the 70ish channels are running commercials. Same when i stay at a hotel with cable. I’m surprised anyone is still willing pay for this.

Thankfully the new machines at my gym have Netflix.

lozaning• 8 years ago

Do you have to have your own netflix to use that or does it use the gym's login?

BoorishBears• 8 years ago

When I heard Netflix was cracking down on household accounts, I didn't realize they were going to go this far into the weeds ;)

jdofaz3• 8 years ago

You use your own, you have the option to make an account with precor and tie the streaming services to it so they work on whatever machine you grab.

plaguuuuuu• 8 years ago

You really have a TV on each machine at your gym? This is peak America

sildur• 8 years ago

It is common in pretty much any developed country.

ip262• 8 years ago

Probably small, couple inches?

Normally I'm there with you, we stuff way too many TV's everywhere as some kind of sign of success & progress. But in the case of the dreadmill, I can understand. Nobody has figured out how to make those livable.

rconti3• 8 years ago

Pretty common. The vendors (Precor, Life Fitness, etc) make modules that are attached to the top of the machine. We had them at my office gym 10 years ago, and that was nothing fancy.

sumedh• 8 years ago

You really have a TV on each machine at your gym? This is peak America

Some of the gyms in Melbourne Australia have TVs on all the treadmill machines. I am talking about normal gyms not some high end fancy gyms.

Itaxpica• 8 years ago

I think I’ve seen this in hotel gyms pretty much everywhere I’ve travelled, including Europe and Russia.

jdofaz3• 8 years ago

That is pretty common, this is the first one I've seen with Netflix and Bluetooth audio

gh02t2• 8 years ago

Hulu runs ads even on the paid service. You have to pay extra on to remove them. They're fairly long, too, around 60-90 seconds every 15 minutes or so. Something about that really gets under my skin, but I'm honestly surprised it's not more prevalent on other services like Netflix.

codazoda• 8 years ago

I hope that the ease of competition on the Internet will make it so I can continue watching ad free TV. I expect Netflix to start increasing prices and adding advertising, it seems like it's just a matter of time. But I hope that new smaller competitors will pop up and I'll switch to those and watch their second rate programming; at least some of the time.

sjg0073• 8 years ago

I pay to remove ads on hulu and guess what, you still get ads every once and while. Mostly on kids shows for some reason.

kruczek• 8 years ago

around 60-90 seconds every 15 minutes or so

Fairly long is relative. Compare that to TV where 15 minutes is the duration of ads, not interval between them...

ConceptJunkie5• 8 years ago

It's annoying, but it's nowhere near as bad as 180 seconds of ads three times in a half hour, which is what you get with broadcast or cable TV.

ryan-allen• 8 years ago

The second Netflix try to run ads I'm cancelling and heading back to the great blue seas.

ConceptJunkie5• 8 years ago

Having ditched satellite TV about 15 years, and relying on Amazon Prime (with only a single ad for another prime show before the video plays, on occasion), or Hulu (limited ads you can pay to get rid of), or Netflix (no ads at all... so far). When I had a chance to be exposed to cable TV recently, I couldn't believe how awful it was. You become desensitized to it, but on top of that, it's constantly been getting worse.

Hulu's ad breaks are significantly shorter than regular TV, and the ads are not 10 times louder than the shows. Ads don't have to be horrible, they're just made that way by design.

fisherjeff• 8 years ago

Q: Will X be invaded by ads?

A: Almost definitely.

Even some major automakers seem to assume that the car of the future will include ads.[0] Amazing that car companies could’ve survived all these decades without them!

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15947784/audi-25th-hour-a...

orev• 8 years ago

Pretty much the entire history of broadcast TV is driven by the auto industry release/advertising schedule, so they’ve been pretty involved in ads for a while now, just not inside the vehicles. It’s merely the final frontier for them.

makecheck• 8 years ago

I thought I’d seen it all until gas pumps started having loud auto-playing videos. I consider it one of the benefits of an electric car that I no longer see gas pump ads.

And this stuff always seems to hit “lowest common denominator” quickly. Once consumer-hostile methods prove some kind of worth, everyone seems to follow suit to compete (or just be as greedy).

cglace• 8 years ago

I actually don't mind videos playing at the pump. There really isn't anything else do to.

dan0008922• 8 years ago

For those still subjected to these who don’t know: Most video-enabled pumps in the US can be muted by pressing the second button from the top on the column of four buttons to the right of the display.

I consider it a small quality of life improvement to not hear the same Seth Meyers joke two or three times while fueling.

useful• 8 years ago

There are many online businesses that sell a product and make more off display ads next to those products. Marketing is crazy and the arbitrage from affiliates is the search for the price of your attention and conversion.

caf2• 8 years ago

I guess it makes sense considering how tiny the margins in fuel retailing are.

Brockenstein• 8 years ago

Even worse, those early systems had mute buttons and those mute buttons got such use they they're obviously worn our or broken through use. So new gas pump AV, no mute button. Last time I pumped gas I stood their with my hand over the speaker to muffle the damn thing.

gcb0• 8 years ago

cars are not entirely without ads for a few decades already: taxis in the US must show ads if they want to have the credit card terminal. visa keeps all of the ad revenue.

WaxProlix• 8 years ago

An interesting exception to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

erikig• 8 years ago

My favorite is when I have to watch an ad before watching an ad.

Every so often I'll come across a funny ad that I want to rewatch it on Youtube. More often than not I find myself having to sit through another ad (sometimes even a competitor's) to watch the initial ad.

jlbbellefeuille• 8 years ago

Why wait for self-driving cars... my startup VUGO is already doing this in rideshare vehicles. Before you all start a revolution, we are focused on improving the passenger entertainment experience and working on the big problem of making short trips free at the intercept of lower cost per mile/seat and our increasing alternative revenue.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3068575/will-ride-hail-be-free-b...

0x8BADF00D• 8 years ago

Wait until BCIs like Neuralink come out. Then there will be no way to escape ads.

TomMckenny• 8 years ago

Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression...

Cable companies, even though they now act as ISPs, where never conceived to track you browsing history and do with it what they will. And somehow there's a wide spread assumption that they won't.

rconti3• 8 years ago

To date, the actual revenues from cable advertising, which totaled about $45 million last year, are minuscule compared with the $11 billion for over-the-air television networks and stations. But scores of big companies, including General Foods, American Express, Procter & Gamble and Pepsico, are already cable advertisers, along with innumerable used-car dealers and other local businesses that can afford cable's relatively low rates. By 1990, according to Paul Kagan, publisher of several cable industry newsletters, cable advertising could exceed $2 billion.

Stunning.

We didn't have cable until the late 90s, and I don't have pay TV anymore, largely for this reason. "Premium" things are always dumbed down. First comes the ads, then the censorship. I'm not willing to pay for ad-laden, censored content, full stop. I happily pay for Spotify, but I won't pay for cable TV or XM.

flatline• 8 years ago

XM was an interesting note there at the end. I realize they are still subject to FCC regulation but they seem mostly add free and uncensored.

jrrrr2• 8 years ago

The existence of cable ads is useful to me when my ISP tries to upsell me on television service.

"Cable? I haven't had that for about fifteen years. Does it still have ads?"

"Yes, sir."

"No thanks, then!"

HocusLocus• 8 years ago

Will bears sell toilet paper in the woods?

EADGBE• 8 years ago

This is one of the wittiest replies I've seen here.

Downvotes must have been because they didn't get it.

Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

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