‘Max’ Joins Innovative Streaming Trend Of Shoving More Ads Down Your Throat
from the brilliant-idea-boss dept
We’ve noted more than a few times that media and streaming execs are all out of original ideas. Now that the market has saturated and subscriber growth has slowed, streaming companies have decided to stop giving the public what it wants (few restrictions, low prices, better quality content) in order to provide Wall Street with the illusion of impossible, endless quarterly growth.
Instead they’ve started focusing on brand cannibalization efforts that have devastated the traditional cable sector: pointless and harmful mergers, price hikes, and the imposition of annoying new nickel-and-diming restrictions. Their latest big idea is the imposition of even more advertisements, or even higher fees to avoid them.
In early 2024, Amazon began charging Prime customers $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. At the time, they promised they’d try to keep ads to a minimum; yet in less than 18 months they’ve doubled the amount of ads users have to deal with.
Warner Brothers Discovery’s “Max” has, of course, followed right along, stuffing fifty-percent more commercial breaks into each program in its ad-based tiers. We noted when this trend emerged that Wall Street demands for impossible quarterly revenue growth would mean these companies wouldn’t be able to help but push their luck, so this sort of thing is right on cue:
“A support page for Max’s Basic with Ads plan says to expect six minutes of ads per hour, a 50 percent jump. And despite its original promise not to show ads during HBO programming, Max has been breaking up HBO shows with commercials as well.”
Max originally promised “a commitment to the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry.” But, like Amazon, those promises were utterly worthless. Very cool. Very innovative.
As Ars Technica notes, this is steadily eroding the value of streaming. And there’s more enshittification to come. Linear TV still reportedly shows 13 to 16 minutes of commercials per hour, so there’s still plenty of runway for these execs to make their services shittier and erode their own quality standards further. At which point you’ll absolutely see a surge in piracy that these execs will blame on everything but themselves.
By 2026 or so you should see a lot of resurgent industry whining about piracy, followed by terrible industry ideas to try and “fix” a problem they created; like lobbying Congress for a ban on VPNs, or working even harder to kick poor people off of their broadband connections for downloading a TV episode.
Filed Under: advertisements, competition, fees, growth, hbo, hbo max, innovation, max, streaming, tv, video
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Comments on “‘Max’ Joins Innovative Streaming Trend Of Shoving More Ads Down Your Throat”
This is a regular reminder Yandex refuses to comply with DMCA requests and lists lots of websites Google is afraid of.
Re:
And is now controlled by a shithole government.
Re:
This is because Yandex doesn’t have to comply with American laws such as the DMCA because it is a Chinese company. This is also why it doesn’t have Section 230 protections.
Re: Re:
…and maybe doesn’t need them, seeing as Section 230 was a response to a bad U.S. court precedent.
Re: Re: Re:
TIL: Bad court precedents are only a thing in the US and the state controls nothing in China. Why don’t you go back behind the Great Firewall, you fucking shill?
Re: Re: Re:2
This is about bad court precedents that make internet-based hosters liable for stuff posted by their users. While I’m sure there have been similar bad precedents outside the USA, there must have been a few sane courts that effectively invented a 230-like rule on their own. And if we’re talking about China, the courts are largely an act anyway: if the government doesn’t like a site, they’ll just shut it down.
So what would something like section 230 do in China? It’d probably just be another act, to pretend like they have similar legal protections to the U.S. Hey, sometimes governments fall for that shit. Remember all those times the E.U. declared it illegal to send data to the U.S., and then the U.S. made some obviously-bullshit promise to not spy on the data, and then it was legal again for a few years till the European courts caught up?
2028, Max has announced a new charge of $45.00 a month for subscribers to watch actual television programmes in blocks of four minutes between advertisements. The 23 subscribers that remain with the streamer were said to be underwhelmed.
Cut to the chase
I, for one, am getting tired of shows interrupting my ads!
But copyright has always been stopping the public from getting what they want. It also means that the “market”, to the extent it exists, is not at all free.
That wasn’t always obvious, particularly before photocopiers and home audio/video recorders made copying practical. But we’re seeing it now: it’s a manipulated monopolistic market, acting like exactly that. And this isn’t going to get better if we ignore the underlying problem and try to apply band-aid “fixes”.
And its now gone past the “Full Circle” moment where Piracy is the superior version of (Insert Streamer Here)’s original show.
Cable TV 2.0...
90% of the ads seem to be for shady meds or shady financial apps… sometimes you’ll see the same ad three times in a row… I’m getting pretty tired of streaming services… even when I find a show I like, it’s like 6 episodes and maybe a year later they add another season. They are rapidly becoming worse than cable TV was. My only solace is that I’ve been vindicated in what I predicted would happen back when streaming was new… man did the fanboys get pissy about that.
Re:
Versioning’s always difficult, but I’d say cable TV itself is now version 2 or later. Certainly the transition to a digital network should have qualified…
Anyway, why would streaming be expected to not become a version of cable TV? It’s mostly the same shows made by the same companies—or companies allied with them, as when Netflix joined the MPAA—delivered in a slightly different way (“slightly” because the “cloud DVR” boxes distributed by cable companies are bascially internet-based streaming boxes). They did a good job of pretending to be different, but it was always a way to “watch TV”, and TV itself hardly changed.
Paid cable wasn’t already about 6 minutes ads per hour, and so the 54 minutes TV show format was born?
Personally, I’m waiting of AI-generated ads, very costly to produce but much more “immersive”, they’ll run for 15 minutes an hour because customers would love them so much (just as they’re already loving price hikes).
Re:
Please drink a verification can.
Re:
When was it ever that high? I don’t see anything much longer than 52 minutes per hour—such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1955, and Star Trek, 1966, both pre-dating cable. But Mission: Impossible, also 1966, was already down to 50 minutes, and broadcast TV shows seem to have gotten down to about 42 before dying.
This is why I happily pirate all of the content I consume and even block any ads that might ever be displayed on this site.
“Ow! My Balls!” looks good though.