Commentary

A Swing And A Miss: TV Consumers Take Another Strike

TV programmers first toyed with us by offering their premium TV shows on the Internet with only three to five minutes per hour of commercials -- half to three-quarters less than exists on traditional TV.

Recently there have been rumblings of TV networks/programmers (now that we have been digitally hooked) wanting to raise Internet commercial load levels to where traditional TV exists, around 10 minutes or more.

The good news? As traditional TV viewers, we could always (at least 40% of the country) fast-forward through those messages via our trusty DVR machines.

But all this might change. A recent Federal Communications Commission ruling gave movie studios the ability to stop viewers from time-shifting films on video-on-demand services.

Studios are now allowed to stop this practice -- via remotely changing consumers' set-top box connections -- to prevent illegal copying of movies.

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Consumer-advocacy groups say this is a dangerous move, just a short step to allowing all TV content owners this ability -- which has been technically possible for years.

The FCC has prohibited the use of so-called "selectable output control" technology, which encodes video programming with a signal to remotely disable set-top box output connections -- because it breaches the privacy of consumer's in-home media activities and equipment.

But just as Internet TV could soon have as many ads as the traditional kind, future TV activity could return to the old ages, pre-2000, when most of the TV viewing public couldn't fast-forward through commercials.

According to the FCC, the change is in the consumer's best interest. It will reportedly give studios the ability to release movies faster into the market after their theatrical release. Studios also say they can save marketing dollars -- by bridging a shorter time gap between theatrical and new digitally released windows.

This is fuzzy logic at best. We all know movie studios and TV companies do what's the best interest of making the most money. What if the new earlier market doesn't develop? Will studios turn back on the time-shifting?

Media companies have been running scared they won't be able to figure out future entertainment habits of consumers with the growing number of new devices. So they are covering all angles.

TV marketers could be thrilled with this decision because it might set a precedent for other, more-marketing-favorable FCC actions.

But consumers might just change their behavior in directions people least expect. Word of warning to the studios: Look what happen to the DVD market over the last couple of years. What if this decline hits other parts of the entertainment business?

3 comments about "A Swing And A Miss: TV Consumers Take Another Strike".
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  1. Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, May 11, 2010 at 5:33 p.m.

    Somewhere in Europe a 15-year-old is devising a work-around to defeat whatever copy-protection that Hollywood can cook up. The unbreakable DVD protection was broken and so, too, will this unskipable scheme. As long as digital information can be appear on a digital screen, it can be captured via some codec. If people want to skip commercials, a way will be found. The analog world is long gone.

  2. Dean Collins from Cognation Inc, May 11, 2010 at 5:43 p.m.

    Lol really Wayne.....I'd love to see my cable provider prevent me from fast forwarding through ads on my MythTV box.

    Cheers,
    Dean

  3. Michael Greeson from The Diffusion Group, May 11, 2010 at 5:44 p.m.

    For those wondering about the actual impact of DVR-affiliated ad skipping on ad recall and product purchases, I encourage you to read a new longitudinal study set for publication in June by the Journal of Marketing Research (full text here: http://www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA/Documents/JMR_Forthcoming/Do_DVRs_Influence.pdf).

    The results will surprise most readers and hopefully reduce the drive of operators and studios to reduce ad skipping by whatever means possible.

    Interestingly, I completed a series of focus groups just last week that in many ways corroborated the findings of this study.

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