CBS Announces New Ad-Free More-Expensive Streaming Service…That Includes Ads

Say That Again

from the subtract dept

Some terrestrial TV stations and cable stations are better at internet-ing than others. While Netflix has built an empire upon streaming ad-free shows, for instance, other services like Hulu have gone the route of a tiered structure, with a price point for streaming with ads and one for streaming without ads. One of the interesting things is seeing other traditional broadcast networks watch how these models play out and then go about offering their own. Take CBS, for instance. It’s very clear that CBS is enamored with the idea of streaming its content advertising free, but likes Hulu’s tiered structure better than that of Netflix.

At CBS’ site, you can see that it is now offering two tiers of its “All Access” platform. The existing service is offered with “Limited Commercials”, while a service that costs $4 more is labeled “Commercial Free.” I’d like to focus on the commercial free offering for a moment, because it’s a bold step that includes giving viewers a way to stream CBS shows “commercial free”, except where there are both commercials and where CBS is choosing to call “commercials” by the term “promotional interruptions” instead.

There are some caveats to CBS’ “commercial-free” option. CBS isn’t spending much time highlighting these asterisks, but they tell you interesting things about the TV ecosystem in 2016:

-If you stream a CBS show live, when it first airs, you’ll still see ads — the same ones you’d see on conventional TV, depending on the local TV market you’re in.

-CBS says “select on-demand shows will include promotional interruptions.” I talked to a CBS rep for a translation: The “promotional interruptions” will be brief, but un-skippable, promos — 15 seconds at most, and no more than two promos per half-hour — for other CBS shows. They’ll show up in about 10 percent of CBS’ episodes, and about 20 percent of its titles — generally its newer shows. That’s because CBS has sold on-demand rights to some of those shows to subscription services like Amazon or Netflix, and in some cases those services have exclusive rights to an ad-free “window” for those shows.

It appears CBS has been taking its cues from the mobile network industry, which absolutely loves calling its plans “unlimited”, even though they are very much limited. In this case, the streaming service is “advertising free”, except for all the ads on live shows and all of the promotional interruptions on streaming the older library. I had once thought that coming up with new business models to appeal to the public was hard. Turns out it’s not! You just have to call one thing by another name and insist the entire world play make believe!

The folks over at Recode appear to think that CBS doesn’t even really want people to use this option.

The big picture is that CBS is still very much in the advertising business, and will be for a very long time. So it is presumably betting that the ad-free option will only be interesting to a subset of its All Access subscribers, who are a small subset of its total audience.

It’s breathtaking in its cynicism. CBS decides to claim a service is something it isn’t while hoping most customers don’t use it or want it and instead use the other level of service. It’s an insight into how the company sees its viewers, as little more than money-levers waiting to be pulled in the right order to extract the maximum amount of revenue, regardless of whether it has to engage in double-speak and obfuscation in order to do so.

We at Techdirt want to play along with CBS on this sort of thing, which is why we’re proud to say that this post is offered to you vulgarity free! On an unrelated note, CBS’ advertising free offering is bullshit.

Filed Under: ad free, ads, promotional interruptions, streaming, streaming tv
Companies: cbs