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Digital TV in Belgium now includes unskippable ads, including in recordings of those shows. The reason why people switched to digital TV subscriptions, of cours
by elric 5y ago
Digital TV in Belgium now includes unskippable ads, including in recordings of those shows. The reason why people switched to digital TV subscriptions, of course, was to be able to skip those ads in the first place.
Apparently Netflix can afford to offer a wide variety of content for a small monthly fee, without any ads, and spend money on content creation; but digital TV stations somehow don't make enough money off of subscriptions which are an order of magnitude more expensive. Economies of scale, perhaps?
- tehjoker 5y agoThere's no "enough" under capitalism, so every medium will eventually reach maximum ad saturation.
- elric 5y agoI've never encountered any ads in printed books. Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO. They're not intrusive. They're pretty much always relevant. They're fun to read. They don't contain tracking cookies. They're as benign as it gets.
- jjgreen 5y agoI've read a few cheap paperbacks from the 1930s and 40s with a couple of pages of ads at the end; mostly for trousers, hairpieces or departments stores. Strange.
- notyourwork 5y agoEver read a newspaper or magazine?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- squarefoot 5y agoThey're completely different from books in this context. A newspaper is usually read within hours from its print; a magazine within days; a book might require six months or six years to be read. Nobody except maybe the same publishing company and a few other businesses would have use for ad space that would require so much time to be seen.
- pueblito 5y agoTons of books come with a teaser for another book added to the end of it
- thaumasiotes 5y agoEven more commonly, a page of "also by this author:".
- Brian_K_White 5y agoI have. Sometimes old paperbacks had glossy full color card stock sheets stuck right in the middle. Glued and cut just like all the other pages.
- willcipriano 5y agoYou have never read a little golden book[0]? The back cover is often ads for other kids books. I recall the Goosebumps books did the same with a PO box that you could send a check to in order to get more books. Sci-fi paperbacks often have ads for other books as well. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Golden_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Golden_Books
- _ph_ 5y agoI have a couple of German paperbacks which had one ad in the middle of a book, often for an instant soup or something like that. But at least it was easy to skip :).
- salgernon 5y agoThis happened to one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books[1] - he changed publishers after this. [1] https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/2015/02/14/whats-rihannsu-soup/ https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/2015/02/14/whats-rihan...
- _ph_ 5y agoYes, that is exactly the kind of ads I was remembering, haven't seen them in a while. But it is funny how the ad text refers to the story it interrupts to pitch the soup :)
- swayvil 5y agoOld 70s scifi paperbacks. Full color ad for cigarettes right in the middle.
- InitialLastName 5y agoMass-market paperbacks frequently include ads (usually for other books in the publication line) in the back. One could also think of "Read this excerpt from the next book by $AUTHOR" as an ad.
- pengaru 5y agoA newer fiction book I skimmed after finding it abandoned at a campsite seemed to have overt and contrived repeated mentions of bmw automobiles, including the models, in places such details didn't seem to have anything at all to do with the story. It left me wondering if some authors now secure contracts to always use a specific brand of $foobar if $foobar makes an appearance in their stories. The only time I've ever encountered this level of repeated brand shilling in a book I actually intended to read was Vonnegut's Bluebeard and its Sateen Dura-Luxe. But there it played a significant part of the story, and it's a fictional brand..
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO. Ah, so what you mean is you've never encountered an online ad in a printed book.
- 8note 5y agoMy Newfoundland community recipe book is chock full of ads. Especially useless ones considering how far away I live from all of those stores
- tehjoker 5y agoChomsky on advertising: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfIwUlY44CM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfIwUlY44CM - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYoKRS_eWZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYoKRS_eWZY
- 8bitsrule 5y agoI respect Chomsky's well-constructed, dark analyses of how we got where we are. He usually stops after this 20-20 hindsight. The messy part, what to do about it, is left to the Chomsky consumer. Unfortunate for those who can only respond with depression or attempts to revive the past.
- tehjoker 5y agoYea... to be honest, after listening to Chomsky and doing activism for years, I think that's because effective action looks like things that would destabilize the US imperial state and economic system. Chomsky is tolerated in academia because he stops short of saying such things and sharply criticizes Communist countries often in ways that do not feel as solid as his research. I think he's very much worth listening to on the problems, but I ignore him on solutions. You can't solve these problems while leaving concentrated centers of market power intact. Nor can you leave the market system that would regenerate them intact either. The trust busters took action in the early 20th century but here we are in a place where it's even worse than before. Nor can we leave the arms manufacturers and military contractors intact either. If all that goes, so does US dominance over world affairs and the influence of the dollar. To that I say: good.
- Dylan16807 5y agoI wonder who found this offensive/flamebait enough to flag you, wow.
- pier25 5y agoSorry but what is digital TV? Cable?
- X-Cubed 5y agoDigital TV is where the content is sent as a digital video stream, rather than an analogue stream. This allows it to: - make better use of the available bandwidth, allowing for more channels to be broadcast or less radio spectrum to be used - offer multiple audio and video streams per channel, eg: surround sound support and translations into other languages - better picture quality through higher resolution and the ability to recover from some transmission/reception errors Commonly referred to as DVB (Digital Video Broadcast), it can be supplied over different bearers: terrestrial (DVB-T), satellite (DVB-S) and cable (DVB-C). DVB is often combined with internet functionality into things like Hbb-TV, which allows for consumers to easily move between live broadcast channels and on-demand content supplied via an internet connection. Freeview in New Zealand uses Hbb-TV, and is broadcast over both terrestrial and satellite bearers, with on-demand video available for the major channels. Cable TV may or may not be digital depending on the provider.
- silisili 5y agoWhen cable TV was introduced in the US, one selling point was 'you pay for it, so no ads.' That didn't last long. Is there some kind of meme/law that insists that over time every product gets ads... because there probably should be.
- anonymousab 5y ago> Apparently Netflix can afford to offer a wide variety of content for a small monthly fee, without any ads, For now, the most they'll do is advertise their other services. But true external ads seem inevitable, especially in the face of the balkanization of digital video content. It's just a matter of when.