clickie
join:2005-05-22
Monroe, MI
| reply to HardwareGeek
Re: Sad
You're mostly correct. Advertising is a trade of the viewer's time for programming. Unfortunately, broadcasters have increasingly tipped the balance of that trade in their favor by inserting more commercials, more promotional messages and on top of that, inserting "snipes" (stupid lower-third advertising) in the middle of the programming. Mark my word, as snipes and those silly "info popups" become more common place, it's all a warm-up to get you to accept them in the middle of the program.
Commercial time used to be tightly regulated, now it's a free-for-all where the commercials can be anywhere from 25% to 100% (infomercials). Some stations have resorted to dropping entire frames of programming so that at the end of the program, they'll have an extra thirty or sixty seconds of advertising to sell paid-for by the viewer! How's that for respecting your audience?
By-passing commercials is an attempt to push that balance to a more equal footing. Broadcasters haven't figured out that the viewer now understands that their time is a valuable commodity. When they treat it as such, they'll either provide more valuable programming, cut back on the number of commercials or be forced into irrelevance by technology.
Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the way it's going to play out.
Worst case scenario is that time-shifting and PVRs that are fully capable of commercial skipping will enter into the domain of the uber geek. Those who can make them, get all the benefits. Those who can't, are stuck with whatever Microsoft deems them worthy of having. |
