Occasionally I run into an ad the fascinates me enough even while fast-forwarding that I will notice it. Sometimes I will watch it repeatedly. Or watch it again when I see it during a later fast forward. I’m sick.

Hey, if advertisements gets shows I want to watch onto hulu, so be it. I’m otherwise 100% OTA.

If a viewer watches prison break, mad men, 24 and family guy….does airing a tampon ad make sense? They know what shows I watch with their cookies. They could know my exact age and sex by requiring me to log in.

Its money being thrown away.

About the OnDemand with Mad Men, I noticed that episodes of Psych on OnDemand have the same exact commercials as the initial airing from 3 or 4 weeks earlier. They’re basically the DVR version without taking up DVR space.

I think for commercials my biggest problem is what is advertised. I have digital cable & phone but, I’m still seeing way too many Time Warner Cable commercials that are usually lower quality.

The 30-second ad on Hulu may cost more per viewer than TV (hypothetically, I don’t really know that), but it would still be cheaper overall because TV gets a lot more viewers. Based on the numbers we have seen, online viewing makes up a small fraction of the overall viewing. TV regularly gets over 10 million viewers. If any show even got close to 1 million online viewers, the net would be issuing hourly press releases.

my simple methods of modeling might overstate the number of ads by as many as 4-10 commercial spots, depending on what percentage of the ads are typically local rather than national spots, and what percentage is allocated to network promos. The local ad load (even if the ads are for national brands) would not be included. I’m not sure what they will do with network promos.

Will someone explain why a 30 second ad on Hulu isn’t MORE costly than a 30 second commercial over broadcast?

I tried to use arrows for emphasis and it did not work.

Will someone explain why a 30 second ad on Hulu isn’t costly than a 30 second commercial over broadcast? When I’m at my computer watching a show, when a 30 second commercial comes on, I sit through the entire thing, watching attentively. When they are 15 seconds, there is even less of an appealing alternative, and I again watch the entire commercial.

Watching live broadcast TV, I change the channel, go to the bathroom, get food, talk with friends, etc. since there are 3+ minutes to do so. My attention is NOT on the commercials.

In the event that I don’t go to less legal means of watching TV online, and I still watch via Hulu with 32 ads per show, I’m going to mute the volume, open a new browser window to do some more surfing, write and email, or do a variety of other things on my computer, aka, not pay attention.

Isn’t there enough additional value in the more certain attentiveness of short, less frequent online ads to compensate for the fewer number? [I'm guessing the answer is no, not that I really believe it].

I would hope that they would be able to have fewer commercials on the internet and reap more per commercial because of it. Adding more commercials to the streaming will cause me to use the DVR and Netflix more. I understand we need to pay for our content somehow, I just think they should be able to get by with the amount of commercials they had years ago.

It is kind of like the catch 22 of our local newspaper. The Boston Globe increased the price to $50 a month and surprise, subs are down more than any other newspaper.

They still haven’t figured it out that if you cut the commercials down to 8 to 10 minutes per hour people may actual not FF through them and end up watching them. They’d be getting value for what they paid. As it is now, you DVR then skip through them. If they think that people are going to be willing to sit through 18 minutes per hour of commercials to watch it online they’re delusion in my opinion.

If they wanted to do this successfully, they should gradually increase the commercial load instead of throwing thirty at us at once. This way we won’t put up that much of a front when our time gets stolen.

I never have been able to understand why they didn’t include the commercials on-line right from the get-go. They had the market cornered and they let it go. For free.

Though I love Felicia Day, The Guild seems the exception, rather than the rule and couldn’t survive without a Microsoft sponsorship and it is still “tiny” by relative comparisons and the videos are distributed on sites like YouTube (who absorbs the CDN costs and doesn’t pass them along to Felicia, a model Google has not yet figured out how to make money on). I think what Felecia has accomplished is very difficult or “everyone would do it.” That said, it seems Felicia would prefer full time TV work if she could get it.

Online the cost of the lines, power, etc. for internet are shared not only by those watching shows online, but everyone using the internet, so that cost per person is less. Users can go directly to the national providers website rather than a local affiliate, so fewer middle men.

Heck, users could go directly to the production houses, bypassing networks altogether, if the production houses were to put their material online directly. Of course the cost of most shows is far too large to be able produce without funding from the large networks, which will still be paid primarily by TV ads and cable subscriptions, but smaller less costly content could be reached directly. Like The Guild. Which probably DID start with a tiny number of viewers, something that could never be supported in the traditional mediums.

Anyway, I think networks should realize that watching shows online is a different experience from watching on tv and adjust their revenue schemes accordingly.

For example adjust the advertisements being shown to the specific user. If I have to watch advertisements I would at least like to watch advertisements that target my demo. This could be done by having optional user info (age range, gender, interests). OPTIONAL of course. Advertisers could actually be charged more depending on who they target. For those who don’t want to fill out the info they would just get advertisements based on the current tv model.

There are so many ways that they could make this work, without alienating online users.

Put advertising, subtle-but important INSIDE the show, then offer torrents. Better yet, a website with a list of those torrents and let other people pay for the bandwidth again.

Then, if/when they make ‘illegal’ copies of things previously broadcast, the ads go with them. Anyone else get hungry for blueberry yogurt thanks to Burn Notice? Same show: my mind has changed about the Saab car-offerings.

Why is it always the hard and complex path with these folks?

still, adding 1 million more users who would watch online costs more money. Adding them on TV costs nothing extra.

My BIG concern, one I’m hoping someone “in the know” will address once this becomes a reality, is how all the extra ads will play into bandwidth caps. I’m on Comcast at home, which has a 250GB monthly cap now, so this won’t affect me so much, but I’m concerned about the more oppressive caps out there. A 25-ish% increase in video consumption just from the ads could really be a problem for someone who has fully embraced streaming already. I’m not sure where to take this without going off on a big tangent at the moment, so I’ll just ask a few questions:

Does anyone know approximately what the data rate is on Hulu? Is it 250MB per “hour” show at 360p, or more? How about 480p? I think that’s the key to the scenario I’m trying to imagine right now. Basically, how much extra data will I have to download with 32 ads? That could be really critical to some people on ISPs with over-the-top oppressive caps in place if they stream a lot of shows.

Well, I think cable/broadcast/satellite financial model would fail if only 1 person was watching. Whereas internet would be very low cost if 1 person was watching. I think internet revenue can be made to scale with users, and therefore the scaling costs are balanced, whereas the other formats require threshold viewers to pay the initial overhead. They can’t just reduce their overhead costs to accomodate their reduced revenue if viewership goes down.

Also I don’t think the ad time matters as much as how many ads. I think online ads can be shorter and more impactful (with CLICK HEREs to go straight to the website). Also I imagine (as others have said) that the online ads will be more national so probably better quality as well.

When I watch on tv I flip to other tv shows during commercials (I’ll have the main show that i’m watching, and then something on Flasback to go to a secondary show that I don’t really care about but like better than commercials). I don’t think TV watchers sit through all the commercials that are played. I think online users are more likely to sit through commercials, if they are brief enough, and therefore maybe fewer minutes of commercials would actually match with how many minutes of commercials tv viewers are actually watching… I think I just confused myself.

There is a ton of content out there on the file upload sites that feeder sites access. Look at CastTV where it could come form zShare, MegaVideo, Hulu, Amazon etc.

I am sure a lot of this content has been copied and would not have commercials in it. This will be very difficult to stop as it is just too easy to set up new sites.

The real potential in online video advertising, is that it can be different for every single viewer, and sites can collect a lot more info about users than networks can, and sell more user specific ads ads at a hefty premium. Google turned that philosophy into a goldmine for search ads, now Hulu and the like need to find away to take advantage of that potential for online video. If the networks decide they want to sell advertising in the exact same way they do for television they’re going to lose out on that. An online viewer will be worth equal to, not more than a television viewer.

I think ramping up the number of commercial would make more sense to get people gradually used to it.

The thing that networks/music companies are just starting to clue into is that it must be easy for the consumer as there are many alternatives available. Annoy them with too many commercial at once and they will drive the users to other sites.

For me I rarely watch the on-demand video within a day or 2 so I would just make sure that it was 3 days if I could not find the content anywhere else.

For this to work they must be able to shut down all the other alternative sites.

We do not get Hulu in Canada anyways which is very annoying as I pay for ABC, CBS, NBS on cable but cannot access the Hulu wetsite without playing around with proxies and fooling Hulu into thinking that I am in the states which is just not worth the trouble when content is available elsewhere. Up until recently, when the streaming starting to become readily available, one of the few instances in which I would use P2P was when I missed an episode of a show that I really cared about. If Hulu was available then I would have used it.

And while I think it could mean that shows that are borderline in current viewing metrics may be saved by high online viewing, I think we’re a long way from having a show that is little viewed on television being “saved” because of all the extra online viewing.

I don’t think the extra ads (even the full load) will make people wait three days if they don’t have to.

On the other hand there is no converged C3 to worry about if the national ad loads are not the same, so if C3 is the plan online and off, they will have to have the same ads online. There will be slightly less load than what’s on TV due to local (I’m not sure what will happen w/promos). I’m also not sure what they will do after three days.

The plan is to rotate the ads out after three days (no more C3 in play) but whether that would result in much lighter ad loads after 3 days and whether that’s potentially behavior changing if people would rather wait a few days for fewer ads…

I think it makes a lot of sense to try to find that threshold of how many ads they can put on without turning off viewers. I think viewers will definitely tolerate more than the 5 or 6 current ads. Though, it may be better to increase the ads incrementally so fewer people notice enough to complain. Going from breaks with one 15- or 30-second ad to breaks with 5 is quite the jump and people would react more than if they start by increasing it to 2 or 3.