10 ms·

And the real question is: will history repeat itself with Netflix, et al? HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question.

elliekelly 6y ago
I’ve recently noticed some Hulu shows that let you know you’ll see ads even if you subscribe to ad-free Hulu.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  IIRC, the licensing arrangement between Hulu and the network prohibits not showing ads on those shows, or some such nonsense.
  - beerandt 6y ago
    The networks have always entirely owned Hulu. It's that way because they want it to be. Netflix has no such network licensing problems.
    - tzs 6y ago
      How quickly does Netflix get those shows? I believe Hulu gets them the day after broadcast. Maybe the network licensing term are different depending on the delay between broadcast and streaming?
      - culturestate 6y ago
        As far as I know, Netflix negotiates those rights independently so it varies per network. They're doing a new-ish model now, though, where Netflix actually pays to co-produce content with networks in exchange for getting faster and/or exclusive streaming access. The most high-profile example off the top of my head is the new Michael Jordan doc; they split the cost with ESPN, and Netflix gets next-day international rights and accelerated domestic streaming rights (3 months after broadcast, I think).
    - rhino369 6y ago
      Netflix doesn't have the problem because they never had ads. Hulu likely signed a deal with ABC (or the production company who make the shows) for those three shows that still have ads before they had the idea to go commercial free. Changing a deal that had a provision about ads is expensive. Hulu was a joint venture between several networks. There are three old shows that still have commercials due to old contracts that were made before they switched to the new business model. Given TV deals are complicated (for example, the networks likely have revenue deals with production companies), its not worth a huge renegotiation.
- icelancer 6y ago
  That's tremendous. That type of brazen not-give-a-shit is impressive to me, as abhorrent as it is.
- scarface74 6y ago
  There are three shows with ads on Hulu without ads. https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#still-see-ads https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#s... The additional shows you can get on demand without Hulu Live TV have ads. But that’s more akin to traditional cable.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    How interesting! The list must update with some frequency because I don’t watch any of the shows currently listed in that link yet I’ve encountered the message a handful of times. The three current shows listed are: - Grey’s Anatomy - Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD - How to Get Away with Murder
rjtobin 6y ago
I think there’s a chance it will be different: at least now there is the potential to offer customers an ad-free package for an extra cost. Some services like Hulu already do this (offering cheaper plan with ads and a slightly pricier plan with no ads). I think with cable this would have been difficult or impossible to achieve. One nice thing about this is it makes plain how much the networks make from showing ads to your household. I happily pay a little extra to “outbid” the ad networks.
- dicknuckle 6y ago
  we actually split Hulu with a friend. we pay the difference between basic and no-ads. it's an auto payment from bank account to bank account every month. life on autopilot.
- 0xff00ffee 6y ago
  Not true. HULU still shows ads, even with "No Ads" version. From their website: Hulu (No Ads) Get First Month Free then $11.99/month A few excluded shows play with ads. [from here https://signup.hulu.com/plans https://signup.hulu.com/plans] That last line kills me. It's like H2G2, you can't have Tea and No Tea unless you remove your common sense particle.
  - dlbucci 6y ago
    I mean, you're not wrong, but it's only for three shows, and there are no ads during the shows, only before and after. It was 7 when it first launched, so it doesn't seem like any other shows or new content will ever have ads. But hey, if you watch Agents of Shield, Grey's Anatomy, or How to Get Away with Murder, that surely does suck.
    - 0xff00ffee 6y ago
      Huh. Thanks for figuring out what shows have ads! Yeah, I guess that isn't as bad as it seems if there are just a few. I didn't bother to look up what "excluded" meant.
mavhc 6y ago
Selling ads globally seems like it's more expensive, unless you automate it like Google etc do, so they'd rather stick to just having subscriptions and be considered premium content.
leereeves 6y ago
> HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question. What do you mean? Is HBO or HBO Go adding commercials?
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  I assume he means that because HBO does not show ads, it is an open question of whether Netflix would try. Personally, I will not subscribe to services that show commercials. Commercials are for free services, not for paid services. As soon as you allow them to cross that boundary....
  - leereeves 6y ago
    I feel the same way, but not everyone does. With that in mind I was wondering which Hulu plan was most popular. All I could find was the same widely syndicated Reuters article [1] from January 2019 calling the plan with ads "Hulu's most popular plan". I guess there is a market for streaming with ads. 1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hulu-prices/hulu-cuts-price-of-most-popular-plan-by-25-percent-idUSKCN1PH229 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hulu-prices/hulu-cuts-pri...
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  They're not selling ads, but they do run a 15-30 second spot before each episode advertising one of their own shows. That doesn't really bother me for now, but it seems like a slippery slope towards showing two spots, or three, or selling those spots to other advertisers. Side note, with all of the streaming subscriptions I have, I'm probably not saving any money compared to when I had traditional cable, but there are fewer commercials and the content is so much better.
m463 6y ago
For every shitty experience, there is a market opportunity. (I hope. There hasn't been much of a market for privacy)
qppo 6y ago
As long as I am given the option to purchase content without advertisements I will do so. If I can't watch a piece of content without ads, I'll either wait until I can or pirate it. Usually the former. Frankly I think content is just overvalued and the actual creation of content is extremely inefficient, from a financial point of view. My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money. It's honestly a terrible industry and needs to be disrupted. Market distortion is the only reason films cost what they do, from production to distribution and consumption. And literally everyone in the pipeline has an incentive to keep the market distorted, except people who watch content. Thank god for piracy.
- akhosravian 6y ago
  I’d be interested in hearing more about what you mean by market distortion here. A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.
  - qppo 6y ago
    I don't know what it is off the top of my head but I think actor pay isn't that big a slice of the cost. What I mean by market distortion is really the lack of insight into value creation. How much value is created by whom in the pipeline, essentially. Data driven, direct to consumer enterprises are changing this a bit and that's great. But my experience is that data doesn't change minds of the top stakeholders, and there are incentives to make decisions that are bad for consumers even if the data says that both sides can win.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money. Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money. (My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)
dylan604 6y ago
HBO also demands a higher fee than something like HGTV or A&E. The one that kills me is ESPN. It is the most expensive channel for a cable operator to carry, and it is also known as a must carry.
- scarface74 6y ago
  HBO is completely different than ESPN. You can choose to pay for HBO. You can’t choose to exclude ESPN.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    ESPN (and consequently sports teams and their players) are about to find out how less valuable they are I think. There are so many options for entertainment that I doubt they will be able to command the wide audience they used to.
jcfields 6y ago
I think the difference is that the infrastructure is decoupled from the content now. Cable systems and satellite fleets were both traditionally very high barriers for new competitors to overcome. Granted, consolidated media oligopolies may get us to the same place a different way.
0x202020 6y ago
I think they are bound to. You don’t think as soon as Disney can they aren’t going to start showing ads for everything Disney related? The worst step back to me from TV -> streaming -> streaming becoming more TV like is content release schedules. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus was a great example, you have all the episodes ready and there isn’t a good reason to keep them sitting behind a time gate. I would be much more likely to subscribe for a month to watch a show in a week than I would be to subscribe for a few months to few one show. Instead you get none of my money
- Talanes 6y ago
  Catering to the customers least interested in keeping the service isn't a great business strategy. Those who do only want to pay for one month to watch the whole show still have the option of subscribing during the last month of airing. Or any time after that.
  - 0x202020 6y ago
    For sure. It’s one of those things that my use case is probably a very, very small percent of users but it would be nice to be a bit more viewer friendly from that point of view. Right now since they have limited new content it feels like they are stretching them to keep subscribers as long as possible.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      That's 100% what they're doing. I imagine most their money is in people who aren't re-evaluating the subscription month to month, and just need some drip of new content to keep justifying inertia.

elliekelly 6y ago

I’ve recently noticed some Hulu shows that let you know you’ll see ads even if you subscribe to ad-free Hulu.

zdragnar 6y ago
IIRC, the licensing arrangement between Hulu and the network prohibits not showing ads on those shows, or some such nonsense.
- beerandt 6y ago
  The networks have always entirely owned Hulu. It's that way because they want it to be. Netflix has no such network licensing problems.
  - tzs 6y ago
    How quickly does Netflix get those shows? I believe Hulu gets them the day after broadcast. Maybe the network licensing term are different depending on the delay between broadcast and streaming?
    - culturestate 6y ago
      As far as I know, Netflix negotiates those rights independently so it varies per network. They're doing a new-ish model now, though, where Netflix actually pays to co-produce content with networks in exchange for getting faster and/or exclusive streaming access. The most high-profile example off the top of my head is the new Michael Jordan doc; they split the cost with ESPN, and Netflix gets next-day international rights and accelerated domestic streaming rights (3 months after broadcast, I think).
  - rhino369 6y ago
    Netflix doesn't have the problem because they never had ads. Hulu likely signed a deal with ABC (or the production company who make the shows) for those three shows that still have ads before they had the idea to go commercial free. Changing a deal that had a provision about ads is expensive. Hulu was a joint venture between several networks. There are three old shows that still have commercials due to old contracts that were made before they switched to the new business model. Given TV deals are complicated (for example, the networks likely have revenue deals with production companies), its not worth a huge renegotiation.
icelancer 6y ago
That's tremendous. That type of brazen not-give-a-shit is impressive to me, as abhorrent as it is.
scarface74 6y ago
There are three shows with ads on Hulu without ads. https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#still-see-ads https://help.hulu.com/s/article/hulu-no-ads?language=en_US#s... The additional shows you can get on demand without Hulu Live TV have ads. But that’s more akin to traditional cable.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  How interesting! The list must update with some frequency because I don’t watch any of the shows currently listed in that link yet I’ve encountered the message a handful of times. The three current shows listed are: - Grey’s Anatomy - Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD - How to Get Away with Murder

rjtobin 6y ago

I think there’s a chance it will be different: at least now there is the potential to offer customers an ad-free package for an extra cost. Some services like Hulu already do this (offering cheaper plan with ads and a slightly pricier plan with no ads). I think with cable this would have been difficult or impossible to achieve. One nice thing about this is it makes plain how much the networks make from showing ads to your household. I happily pay a little extra to “outbid” the ad networks.

dicknuckle 6y ago
we actually split Hulu with a friend. we pay the difference between basic and no-ads. it's an auto payment from bank account to bank account every month. life on autopilot.
0xff00ffee 6y ago
Not true. HULU still shows ads, even with "No Ads" version. From their website: Hulu (No Ads) Get First Month Free then $11.99/month A few excluded shows play with ads. [from here https://signup.hulu.com/plans https://signup.hulu.com/plans] That last line kills me. It's like H2G2, you can't have Tea and No Tea unless you remove your common sense particle.
- dlbucci 6y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong, but it's only for three shows, and there are no ads during the shows, only before and after. It was 7 when it first launched, so it doesn't seem like any other shows or new content will ever have ads. But hey, if you watch Agents of Shield, Grey's Anatomy, or How to Get Away with Murder, that surely does suck.
  - 0xff00ffee 6y ago
    Huh. Thanks for figuring out what shows have ads! Yeah, I guess that isn't as bad as it seems if there are just a few. I didn't bother to look up what "excluded" meant.

mavhc 6y ago

Selling ads globally seems like it's more expensive, unless you automate it like Google etc do, so they'd rather stick to just having subscriptions and be considered premium content.

leereeves 6y ago

> HBO demonstrates that it’s still an open question. What do you mean? Is HBO or HBO Go adding commercials?

SubiculumCode 6y ago
I assume he means that because HBO does not show ads, it is an open question of whether Netflix would try. Personally, I will not subscribe to services that show commercials. Commercials are for free services, not for paid services. As soon as you allow them to cross that boundary....
- leereeves 6y ago
  I feel the same way, but not everyone does. With that in mind I was wondering which Hulu plan was most popular. All I could find was the same widely syndicated Reuters article [1] from January 2019 calling the plan with ads "Hulu's most popular plan". I guess there is a market for streaming with ads. 1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hulu-prices/hulu-cuts-price-of-most-popular-plan-by-25-percent-idUSKCN1PH229 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hulu-prices/hulu-cuts-pri...
bonestamp2 6y ago
They're not selling ads, but they do run a 15-30 second spot before each episode advertising one of their own shows. That doesn't really bother me for now, but it seems like a slippery slope towards showing two spots, or three, or selling those spots to other advertisers. Side note, with all of the streaming subscriptions I have, I'm probably not saving any money compared to when I had traditional cable, but there are fewer commercials and the content is so much better.

m463 6y ago

For every shitty experience, there is a market opportunity. (I hope. There hasn't been much of a market for privacy)

qppo 6y ago

As long as I am given the option to purchase content without advertisements I will do so. If I can't watch a piece of content without ads, I'll either wait until I can or pirate it. Usually the former. Frankly I think content is just overvalued and the actual creation of content is extremely inefficient, from a financial point of view. My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money. It's honestly a terrible industry and needs to be disrupted. Market distortion is the only reason films cost what they do, from production to distribution and consumption. And literally everyone in the pipeline has an incentive to keep the market distorted, except people who watch content. Thank god for piracy.

akhosravian 6y ago
I’d be interested in hearing more about what you mean by market distortion here. A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.
- qppo 6y ago
  I don't know what it is off the top of my head but I think actor pay isn't that big a slice of the cost. What I mean by market distortion is really the lack of insight into value creation. How much value is created by whom in the pipeline, essentially. Data driven, direct to consumer enterprises are changing this a bit and that's great. But my experience is that data doesn't change minds of the top stakeholders, and there are incentives to make decisions that are bad for consumers even if the data says that both sides can win.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money. Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money. (My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)

dylan604 6y ago

HBO also demands a higher fee than something like HGTV or A&E. The one that kills me is ESPN. It is the most expensive channel for a cable operator to carry, and it is also known as a must carry.

scarface74 6y ago
HBO is completely different than ESPN. You can choose to pay for HBO. You can’t choose to exclude ESPN.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  ESPN (and consequently sports teams and their players) are about to find out how less valuable they are I think. There are so many options for entertainment that I doubt they will be able to command the wide audience they used to.

jcfields 6y ago

I think the difference is that the infrastructure is decoupled from the content now. Cable systems and satellite fleets were both traditionally very high barriers for new competitors to overcome. Granted, consolidated media oligopolies may get us to the same place a different way.

0x202020 6y ago

I think they are bound to. You don’t think as soon as Disney can they aren’t going to start showing ads for everything Disney related? The worst step back to me from TV -> streaming -> streaming becoming more TV like is content release schedules. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus was a great example, you have all the episodes ready and there isn’t a good reason to keep them sitting behind a time gate. I would be much more likely to subscribe for a month to watch a show in a week than I would be to subscribe for a few months to few one show. Instead you get none of my money

Talanes 6y ago
Catering to the customers least interested in keeping the service isn't a great business strategy. Those who do only want to pay for one month to watch the whole show still have the option of subscribing during the last month of airing. Or any time after that.
- 0x202020 6y ago
  For sure. It’s one of those things that my use case is probably a very, very small percent of users but it would be nice to be a bit more viewer friendly from that point of view. Right now since they have limited new content it feels like they are stretching them to keep subscribers as long as possible.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    That's 100% what they're doing. I imagine most their money is in people who aren't re-evaluating the subscription month to month, and just need some drip of new content to keep justifying inertia.