Streaming’s Latest ‘Innovation’: Ads When You Hit Pause
from the the-kids-will-love-it dept
Now that growth is saturated in the streaming sector, companies are increasingly behaving like the cable TV giants they once disrupted in a bid to deliver Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost. Even if it means annoying consumers and damaging the company’s long-term brand.
Netflix now wants to harass you for doing something it spent years saying was ok (password sharing). Amazon thinks it’s a clever idea to charge existing Prime subscribers an additional fee if they want to skip ads. All while catalog quality shrinks or gets worse and pricing increases.
And what passes for innovation just isn’t that innovative. Take for example Hulu, Peacock and Max, which are increasingly experimenting not with interesting new technologies or innovative new content ideas, but with ads that appear when you hit the pause button:
“The stakes are high. Despite subscribers’ disdain for watching commercials, more streamers are adopting advertising, cognizant that they need the revenue it brings with it.”
Of course, the implementation needs work. Increasingly, ad-based streaming services seem oblivious that they routinely run the same, low-quality ads multiple times in succession. It’s a delicate balance to avoid annoying customers; something companies in a rush for profits probably aren’t going to get right:
“Having a bad experience or having a lot of ad clutter erodes the impact of ads and is really bad for users,” says Kara Manatt, executive vice president of intelligence solutions at Magna, a media-research unit of advertising giant Interpublic Group. “We found in research that they may actually change their behavior because of this. They may actually cancel their streaming service.”
Endless price hikes. An overabundance of ads. Lots of effort to nickel-and-dime users. Where have we heard of this before? Oh, that’s right: Comcast.
The underlying apparatus that destroyed cable TV and gave us Comcast (Wall Street obsession with short term growth at all costs, mindless consolidation, unfair treatment of labor, outsized compensation for bumbling high level executives) is hard at work trying to ruin streaming. In turn spawning another new round of disruptive innovation from more interesting companies as the cycle starts anew.
Filed Under: cable, competition, enshittification, max, peacock, tv, video
Companies: hulu, nbc, warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Streaming’s Latest ‘Innovation’: Ads When You Hit Pause”
“Amazon thinks it’s a clever idea to charge existing Prime subscribers an additional fee if they want to skip ads.”
This kind of double-dipping has been engaged in for years by BskyB, in that you have to pay a fee to receive Sky, but then still have to watch adverts on all the channels that aren’t available on FreeView. There’s nothing new under the sun…
I try to remember if it wasn’t Microsoft that was able to detect, using the defunct Kinect, when a someone was not looking at the screen to automatically pause the ad and resume it when he looks at the screen again, to force him to see the ad fully. (Well, Spotify also pauses ads when the sound is muted).
Kinect was also able to count the number of persons looking at the screen to show a warning when it exceeds the limit allowed.
Maybe Microsoft was ten years ahead of time.
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I think there was a patent, but AFAIK getting a patent doesn’t mean it’s actually possible (or commercially viable – MS lost a hell of a lot of money because of less objectionable ideas with the XBox One launch).
Literally the #1 reason to pause a show is to make it quiet while you answer your phone, this is completely against any rational design principles.
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I would say that’s #2. Going #1 is likely #1.
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Is that an actual statistic? I’m told that many people don’t “answer phones” anymore, preferring to use text-messaging or text-based apps. I’d have guessed the #1 reason was to use a washroom, with #2 possibly being to get a snack.
Anyway, nobody said these ads play sound.
What I find weird is that the ad in the screenshot has a QR code on it. So I’m supposed to use one internet-capable device to take a picture of another internet-capable device, rather than just pressing a “tell me more” button? And who’d legitimately do either thing? The only reason I’ve ever clicked an ad was to cost an advertiser money for annoying me (open it in a new background tab, wait a few seconds, close the tab).
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Which makes this idea the most annoying form of adverts.
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Oh, believe me, they’d take away your mute and volume buttons if they could. As far as the advertisers and streaming services are concerned, you have no right to avoid ads.
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For reference, here are the buttons a DVD or Blu-ray can take away: stop, pause, forward, menu, and audio-select, among others, though not (yet) mute or volume. (Film studios who enjoy gaslighting can also disable the warning that would normally appear when pressing a prohibited button.)
I don’t imagine that the assholes in charge gave up that ability when people went to streaming.
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Can still pull the plug I hope.
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No such luck: it’s solar-powered. (Solar power. When will people learn?)
Whatever happened to the two-tier option?
What ever happened to the simple solution of charging one price with ads, and another without? Lot of tech hoops being jumped, when a solution is already available. It least the customer gets to choose to pay more or not.
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They all have ad-free subscriptions as well. This
bugfeature seems to be for the ad-supported subscription. For now.Re: Re:
Read again: “Amazon thinks it’s a clever idea to charge existing Prime subscribers an additional fee if they want to skip ads.”
Prime is Amazon’s subscription service. There shouldn’t even be ads on it in the first place. Greedy, double-dipping bastards.
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Yeah, but it’s kind of their “everything” subscription service. It never used to include video streaming at all, so it has many subscribers who never use that. Now that people are starting to, Amazon’s costs are going up… it’s their own damn fault, but I’m not quite sure it’s “double” dipping. More like a lack of clarity about what people were paying for.
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You’re referring to a different thing. I’m talking about the ads when a viewer pauses, not Prime’s double-dipping.
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They realized that they could make more money by showing ads to those who chose “without”.
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I pay for no ads on Paramount plus, yet still get a 6 second unskippable ad before each episode, along with another 60 second unskippable ad before each episode 50% of the time.
I’d have no problem with their promos being there when I pay for ad free if they were skippable and if it literally wasn’t the Big Brother and Buddy Camp promo every single time
Tivo used to drop adds into the pause. It wasn’t a big deal mostly because it just replaced your frozen show frame with a frozen ad which was completely ignorable. The only time it was annoying was where you were pausing to look at the credits to see where a show was filmed or an actors name. But many years ago when I still had Tivo, networks usually mangled the credits so not really a problem.
I personally love the Ads that are not edited correct and causes the application to crash and when you go back in, you have to try and watch the same ad again before you can put it back to where it crashed and then again, have to watch it before it continues to play. Not so bad when I have it on for background noise but when I am trying to watch a news report about the mass shooting near my friend’s house, it gets really annoying.
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I feel like you’re calling out Hulu here 🤣
Movie theaters have doing something similar
Even though people have to pay to see a movie, theaters run ads before the movie. So, yes, they’re double dipping also, by taking money from the viewer and from the advertisers.
I wouldn’t mind ads for something interesting, especially on the big screens, but the last time I saw a movie, the ads were exactly the same I saw on TV the night before.
However, what’s the advertising market for places like Amazon and Netflix? Will the ads be for junk or will the ad system show the same 4 or 5 ads because there aren’t many companies buying ads?
Does Amazon or Netflix even care about the viewer experience as long as they make plenty of money from ads? Of course, less viewers mean less of an audience for the ads, which means companies won’t be willing to pay as much for ad space. But that’s an issue to worry about next year.
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They’ve been doing that for like a hundred years (well, they started off after the movie, hence the term “trailer”, but that didn’t last long because people would just leave). Non-theater-/film-related ads have been around for at least 30. Books have often had ads for other books by the same author or publisher, for at least as long. Newpapers and magazines pretty much always did it.
The idea that more ads will lead to fewer viewers is not supported by history. “Ad-free” is basically a temporary scheme, to attract customers for future advertising. Saying you “wouldn’t mind ads” under certain conditions is where the frog-boiling begins.
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Not really… It used to be the fact that you’re buy a ticket and stay in the theatre as long as you liked. It wasn’t until movies like Psycho stopped people from entering the cinema before a certain point that selling a ticket for one movie was common – before that, people bought a ticket and sat through the b-movie, cartoons and newsreels until the main movie started again.
I disagree here – ads are one of the major excuses for piracy. Especially with people who used to be able to access ad-free content. I certainly know several people who stopped buying DVDs at least in part because they couldn’t skip the anti-piracy ads on the discs they bought…
At least...
At least they can’t override my “MUTE” button. (Yet…)
Another problem is targeted ads. Living in Canada, there are not as many advertisers targeting our area and demographic on that platform – so far, for me, ads are from streaming a program from broadcast TV sites when the DVR fails to record, thanks to too much “breaking news” interruptions. They do tend to be very repetitive, which makes them doubly annoying. My Netflix, fortunately, so far only feeds me previews for other shows.
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That you can watch or skip content at will, but you will watch the adds is annoying to say the least.
Do you remember ...
When a few article showed up claiming that Netflix stream was so good and so reasonably priced that video piracy rates were going down?
Guess what? Those skills those people had that they stopped using because paying for Netflix was just easier. Those skills aren’t completely gone.
1st world problems
This is just a reminder to turn it off, tune out and take a hike.
What would a disruptor to the current streaming market even look like? Also, any potential disruptor is not really gonna gain much traction in the streaming market without the catalogs of the major studios on the service – the same studios that have their own streaming platforms that they wouldn’t want anyone else competing with.
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Netflix. The problem is that everyone wanted a piece of that pie, so the company that offered “everything streaming to every device” – which is what the public actually wants – now has to compete with services that offer nothing other than a restriction.
We had a brief moment where people for a decent and affordable alternative to piracy, but greed seems to be telling people that they have to sail again, and there’s no “disruptor” that’s going to appear when the tech is here but not the legal option to provide what people want.
Well…
In general, my first thought is to be ok with this. In general, it’s unobtrusive and not detracting from watching the show. Then I remember that my main reason for pausing is to try to see something on the screen, which the ad blocks. It’s bad enough on some platforms where the whole screen dims when paused and the scrollbars wont disappear until you play 🤦♂️
It’s interesting
… how some people hate advertising, most put up with it, and some of us love it.
I don’t watch the big sports games, like the Super Bowl. But the next day I’m on YouTube watching the stream of the game with all the boring sports taken out, just wall to wall advertising. I own box sets of advertising from 1930 to the 1980s. Subscribe to “found footage” channels that run adverts found on old home recordings.
I still wonder why nobody creates an advertising channel or service for people like me.
Kind of like Demolition Man, I’d be hooked on an all advertising radio station or tv channel.