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Interesting the focus on piracy in this article. TV was losing it when their customers started needing a DVR to watch their favourite shows because of counter

Interesting the focus on piracy in this article. TV was losing it when their customers started needing a DVR to watch their favourite shows because of counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Now everyone has an average of two of Netflix/Prime/etc. because it's just eliminating the DVR and all the headaches involved and just getting the shows you want when you want them. TV is still around and will be for a while yet, but it continues to fade.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
> 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. It's a feedback loop. Audiences increasingly switch to streaming, so companies are willing to pay less per a second of advertising. TV stations increase the amount of time dedicated to advertising to compensate, which drives more of the audience into streaming.
- qnsi 5y ago
  You should really read some introduction to economics to get a good mental model of how those things work. Why wouldnt TV companies do this in the past when TV was in the prime? Just increase number of ads and get more money. Clearly there is some limit as to how many ads to show because I dont believe they want to decrease the viewership numbers
  - wvenable 5y ago
    If there are a limited number of ad spots, the scarcity makes those spots more expensive. And, as you said, the number of ads has a negative effect on viewership which would make those ad spots less valuable as well. That was past. Now that viewership is declining and alternative mass advertising opportunities are available what we're seeing is the death spiral. There's no natural scarcity making TV ad spots more valuable. Viewership is in decline. The only way to even maintain income levels is to increase the number of ads. If there is a formula on the perfect amount of ads, the inputs to that formula have changed.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    I have an advanced degree in economics, but okay :) How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? I'd say the more likely explanation is that there is a lag between audience loss and advertiser realisation of audience loss. TV stations manage to meet market growth expectations by exploiting this and pumping out overvalued ads to non-existent people. Over time, they've become increasingly reliant on this strategy to keep their heads above water as advertisers catch up to reality. It can't go on forever, so they've now belatedly started their own streaming services to try and keep up.
    - johncessna 5y ago
      > How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? It seems possible to me that folks who are still watching tv are more accepting of ads, whereas the folks who aren't/weren't moved to something else.
      - scoopertrooper 5y ago
        That'd slow the decrease in overall viewership for sure, old folks homes need to put something on during the day. But the key demographic (18-54 year olds) are likely less ad tolerant, as channels keep upping the ante on ad time they'll lose their most lucrative audience members.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I haven't studied economics at all, but if you could get your academic comrades to stop offering intro courses as one-and-done gen-eds, I bet we'd drastically improve the quality of online armchair economic analyses.
    - pomian 5y ago
      I think we have seen the same drama in newspapers. More ads. Even whole cover page, is an advertisement. Reduced readership, and unlikely to attract more due to high advertising volume.
  - dmurray 5y ago
    This is harsh. GP's theory doesn't clash with traditional economics. One reasonable answer to your question: TV companies didn't increase the number of ads because consumers would switch to a channel with fewer ads. In fact, they showed just enough ads to break even, as the marginal ad revenue per hour tended towards the cost of producing an hour of television (because of the perfectly competitive TV market you posit). Now the cost has stayed the same, but the number of eyeballs has dropped, so TV networks need to show more ads or go out of business.
    - LexGray 5y ago
      Tv failing from pushing advertising again is getting relevant to the current state of social media. The amount of time Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. try to keep their customers away from the content they came for is astonishing. I recently deleted Twitter because they were spamming me with notifications in the app that they were not able to spam me with notifications outside the app for live streams I never showed the slightest interest in and half the posts were topics I never chose to follow. Reddit is neatly as bad with their random top streamer stuffed into unrelated subs, daily requests to add more interests, and a popular and news tab that are toxic. I don’t mind the occasional sponsored item but I am pretty sure Facebook is nearing a 1:1 ratio for junk to content. There most of the content is junk too. I just check my notifications at this point because I can’t make heads or tails of what they show and what they hide or the sort order of what they do choose to present. It is like they learned nothing from why tv and radio dying and are competing to see who becomes irrelevant the fastest.
      - YuccaGloriosa 5y ago
        Even Facebook is trying to distance itself from Facebook these days. I accidentally went to TVguide.co.uk today, on a different PC to usual, not equipped with ad blocking, it was barely usable due to ads.
    - YuccaGloriosa 5y ago
      In the UK at least, TV stations have a limit on the duration of ads per hour.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    TV has always had competition. With anything else you do in your free time. When it started it competed with radio. Later it competed with what you had on the VCR. Then gaming. Then streaming. They always had to worry about losing people to other activities. And as such, they couldn't just run 25 minutes of ads and 5 minutes of show, because people wouldn't watch. There are more ads now because the people who are left on linear TV are the people who are most die hard about watching it and will take more abuse, or simply don't have any idea what to do with their free time instead.
- Kranar 5y ago
  This doesn't jive with how pricing typically works. There is no such feedback loop, at least not one that is as simple as you're making it out to be. Consider that your feedback loop implies a kind of symmetry by which TV stations could presumably also increase revenue by decreasing ads and attracting viewers in the process. If TV stations have good reason to believe that increasing the amount of time dedicated to ads would increase revenue, they would have already done so a long time ago regardless of streaming. My suspicion is that TV is increasing ads because people are moving to streaming without any kind of feedback loop involved. Those who are left willing to watch TV will do so regardless of increased advertisements. It's not that ads are pushing people to streaming creating some kind of feedback loop, it's that people are simply moving to streaming because it's a better product across a multitude of factors and those who are stuck with TV will continue to be stuck with it, ads or no ads.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  I don't know if it's my imagination but I've noticed this with FM radio too. Sometimes I'll turn on the radio in the car because there's a local station that plays music I like, but it's become unlistenable because the ad:music ratio is about 50% now. And the ads seem to be mostly for things boomers might buy (like hearing aids, luxury cars, and blood pressure medicine), because of course everybody younger never listens to the radio. FM radio is dead; it just doesn't know it yet.
  - Jcampuzano2 5y ago
    A number of times the past few years I have tried turning on the FM radio in my car just for old times sake, or if my phone is dead or something. A vast majority of the time, I will flip through all 6 programmed channels on my radio and every single one is on ad-break. So I decide to sit on one that I'll just wait through... but then I realize I've sat there for what feels like 5+ minutes (longer than one average song) still being bombarded with ads and justifyingly so decide that radio is no longer for me, and so off it goes for another year.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    AM radio is even worse. It’s descent into fringe talk radio turned the ad side of the business into prostate pills and ads that are probably fake. Radio used to mint money. I think what you’re seeing is the decline in the business led to consolidation, and now they are milking whatever they can get until they can sell the spectrum to someone.
    - dreamcompiler 5y ago
      It seems to me that AM still has an audience in people who are really into nutty conspiracy theories and/or religion. It might survive.
  - rhino369 5y ago
    FM radio probably knows it, but what are they going to do? Nobody is going to start listening if they reduced ads. Best course to just squeeze every last dime out of the current listeners until you can't turn a profit anymore.
bartread 5y ago
> counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. ^^^This. I basically can't tolerate watching anything on ITV, Sky, or other commercial TV in the UK nowadays, nor for well over a decade, due to the frequency and quantity of ads. I also strongly object to what I presume is audio compression applied to ads to make them louder than surrounding scheduled programming. And counter programming is an obnoxious practice. Let's face it: lots of people have always wanted to watch what they want when they want to. Lots of people don't want to arrange their lives around the TV schedule. Good riddance to it.
- Kye 5y ago
  A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Failure to fix something can be innocent or malicious: someone high up can simply not prioritize it, and no one could honestly say it's to serve advertisers without an admission. Some of it is innocent, some isn't. Laws are passed to regulate it, but they find ways past it.
  - Legion 5y ago
    > A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Weird how this supposed lack of normalization never seems to result in overly quiet commercials...
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      Like hospital billing errors always being in favor of the hospital.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    They use psycho-acoustics. It's not actually louder, in the sense of carrying more acoustic energy overall; but the sound-engineer emphasises those parts that we perceive as "loud". Regulators are pwned, and refuse to act. Movie sound-engineers seem to have started doing the same. I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle. [Edit] And advertisers hire loud, shouty actors to present their ads; it's almost as if they were challenging us to change channel or stick in a DVD.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Hmmm. That would be nice. I watched a one-hour show last night (with a 6-minute ad-break) that rolled titles at the 40-minute point. There followed a 10-minute ad-break, and 10 minutes of trailers. All of the ads were low-grade - hearing aids, wills and equity-release, and charity donation pitches.
- iso1631 5y ago
  > I watched a one-hour show last night Why? In the 80s there wasn't much choice, but today you can watch pretty much whatever you want when you want with no adverts, no catering for the lowest common denominator, and at least in the UK TV viewing has dropped so much that it's no longer needed to be social at work the next day (in the 80s everyone cared who shot dirty den or whatever in eastenders, as pretty much half the country watched it. Not so now)
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    * I don't work (retired) * I was in the mood for a Twilight Zone episode * I wasn't in the mood for that when I scheduled my recordings. I normally only watch news bulletins live. I don't have a feed of $EVERYTHING; I have Freesat and a bunch of basic Sky channels, with catchup services such as iPlayer. I cancelled Netflix. I'd subscribe to a service that offered $EVERYTHING, but it doesn't exist.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      > bunch of basic Sky channels Apparently £276 a year, more than I pay for netflix, amazon, disney and spend on "other" things (like discovery on apple). And for that price you still get adverts forced down your throat. Amazing.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    I've been rewatching random episodes of The Simpsons recently, and I have noticed that without ad breaks, the pacing is a bit off for a lot of episodes. The shows were designed so you had time to digest major plot points during the commercial breaks. Don't get me wrong I don't want to watch ads, but it's a strange and noticeable problem.
efitz 5y ago
You nailed it. From the footnotes in the article: “A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.” The biggest problem, IMO, with copyright in the current age is that the copyright holders want to adopt business models premised on controlling me and my experience. I’m not reluctant to paying for content, but if you make the experience suck I will work around you.
- verelo 5y ago
  This, 100% this, all the time, every day. Stop making buying your content so hard, impossible, or generally shit that it's easier to get illegally.
- munk-a 5y ago
  This is a large part, from my observation at least, of the reason why Game of Thrones was so insanely pirated. If you can recall a few years prior another nerd sensation was sweeping the country (Lost) - but by the time GoT came around Netflix and other streaming services were really coming into prominence. HBO Go in that era refused to offer you a la carte access - instead requiring you to have an account with a major cable company to gain the privilege to pay for access. I think the contrast is pretty clear because now we've got a plethora of independent streaming services with their own costs (like Dropout and Nebula) that don't seem to be having trouble attracting customers - even if it's just for a single series or creator (i.e. Dimension 20). The ease of access is a key point for me. I am morally opposed to piracy under normal circumstances - but if you're levying a price that I need to pay with my time or sanity I'm going to table flip and go back to the dark side (or, more likely in the modern day, just not watch your crap since there's plenty of stuff out there).
  - heurisko 5y ago
    I agree. For the last series of GoT I bought a month pass from a streaming service in the UK--"Now TV" or something--to watch it. It was a reasonable price, so I think they were successful there. On the other hand, the last series was garbage.
athenot 5y ago
> and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV And now Instagram shows 1 ad every 3 posts/stories, which is getting closer to the ratio on TV.
- munk-a 5y ago
  There's a reason I don't use instagram - but also a reason I am forever thankful to my pi-hole.
a4isms 5y ago
A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared about: “You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.” My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes Music Store. It wasn’t peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners in content are always those who make it easy. p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going to a theatre!
- thinkingkong 5y ago
  I think this is also what makes Amazon so succesful. Their primary product is convenience. Not “stuff”.
  - a4isms 5y ago
    With Prime, you can type the name of a product and get it right away.* ——— * For sufficiently next-day values of “right away.”

scoopertrooper 5y ago

> 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. It's a feedback loop. Audiences increasingly switch to streaming, so companies are willing to pay less per a second of advertising. TV stations increase the amount of time dedicated to advertising to compensate, which drives more of the audience into streaming.

qnsi 5y ago
You should really read some introduction to economics to get a good mental model of how those things work. Why wouldnt TV companies do this in the past when TV was in the prime? Just increase number of ads and get more money. Clearly there is some limit as to how many ads to show because I dont believe they want to decrease the viewership numbers
- wvenable 5y ago
  If there are a limited number of ad spots, the scarcity makes those spots more expensive. And, as you said, the number of ads has a negative effect on viewership which would make those ad spots less valuable as well. That was past. Now that viewership is declining and alternative mass advertising opportunities are available what we're seeing is the death spiral. There's no natural scarcity making TV ad spots more valuable. Viewership is in decline. The only way to even maintain income levels is to increase the number of ads. If there is a formula on the perfect amount of ads, the inputs to that formula have changed.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  I have an advanced degree in economics, but okay :) How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? I'd say the more likely explanation is that there is a lag between audience loss and advertiser realisation of audience loss. TV stations manage to meet market growth expectations by exploiting this and pumping out overvalued ads to non-existent people. Over time, they've become increasingly reliant on this strategy to keep their heads above water as advertisers catch up to reality. It can't go on forever, so they've now belatedly started their own streaming services to try and keep up.
  - johncessna 5y ago
    > How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? It seems possible to me that folks who are still watching tv are more accepting of ads, whereas the folks who aren't/weren't moved to something else.
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      That'd slow the decrease in overall viewership for sure, old folks homes need to put something on during the day. But the key demographic (18-54 year olds) are likely less ad tolerant, as channels keep upping the ante on ad time they'll lose their most lucrative audience members.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I haven't studied economics at all, but if you could get your academic comrades to stop offering intro courses as one-and-done gen-eds, I bet we'd drastically improve the quality of online armchair economic analyses.
  - pomian 5y ago
    I think we have seen the same drama in newspapers. More ads. Even whole cover page, is an advertisement. Reduced readership, and unlikely to attract more due to high advertising volume.
- dmurray 5y ago
  This is harsh. GP's theory doesn't clash with traditional economics. One reasonable answer to your question: TV companies didn't increase the number of ads because consumers would switch to a channel with fewer ads. In fact, they showed just enough ads to break even, as the marginal ad revenue per hour tended towards the cost of producing an hour of television (because of the perfectly competitive TV market you posit). Now the cost has stayed the same, but the number of eyeballs has dropped, so TV networks need to show more ads or go out of business.
  - LexGray 5y ago
    Tv failing from pushing advertising again is getting relevant to the current state of social media. The amount of time Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. try to keep their customers away from the content they came for is astonishing. I recently deleted Twitter because they were spamming me with notifications in the app that they were not able to spam me with notifications outside the app for live streams I never showed the slightest interest in and half the posts were topics I never chose to follow. Reddit is neatly as bad with their random top streamer stuffed into unrelated subs, daily requests to add more interests, and a popular and news tab that are toxic. I don’t mind the occasional sponsored item but I am pretty sure Facebook is nearing a 1:1 ratio for junk to content. There most of the content is junk too. I just check my notifications at this point because I can’t make heads or tails of what they show and what they hide or the sort order of what they do choose to present. It is like they learned nothing from why tv and radio dying and are competing to see who becomes irrelevant the fastest.
    - YuccaGloriosa 5y ago
      Even Facebook is trying to distance itself from Facebook these days. I accidentally went to TVguide.co.uk today, on a different PC to usual, not equipped with ad blocking, it was barely usable due to ads.
  - YuccaGloriosa 5y ago
    In the UK at least, TV stations have a limit on the duration of ads per hour.
- jedberg 5y ago
  TV has always had competition. With anything else you do in your free time. When it started it competed with radio. Later it competed with what you had on the VCR. Then gaming. Then streaming. They always had to worry about losing people to other activities. And as such, they couldn't just run 25 minutes of ads and 5 minutes of show, because people wouldn't watch. There are more ads now because the people who are left on linear TV are the people who are most die hard about watching it and will take more abuse, or simply don't have any idea what to do with their free time instead.
Kranar 5y ago
This doesn't jive with how pricing typically works. There is no such feedback loop, at least not one that is as simple as you're making it out to be. Consider that your feedback loop implies a kind of symmetry by which TV stations could presumably also increase revenue by decreasing ads and attracting viewers in the process. If TV stations have good reason to believe that increasing the amount of time dedicated to ads would increase revenue, they would have already done so a long time ago regardless of streaming. My suspicion is that TV is increasing ads because people are moving to streaming without any kind of feedback loop involved. Those who are left willing to watch TV will do so regardless of increased advertisements. It's not that ads are pushing people to streaming creating some kind of feedback loop, it's that people are simply moving to streaming because it's a better product across a multitude of factors and those who are stuck with TV will continue to be stuck with it, ads or no ads.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
I don't know if it's my imagination but I've noticed this with FM radio too. Sometimes I'll turn on the radio in the car because there's a local station that plays music I like, but it's become unlistenable because the ad:music ratio is about 50% now. And the ads seem to be mostly for things boomers might buy (like hearing aids, luxury cars, and blood pressure medicine), because of course everybody younger never listens to the radio. FM radio is dead; it just doesn't know it yet.
- Jcampuzano2 5y ago
  A number of times the past few years I have tried turning on the FM radio in my car just for old times sake, or if my phone is dead or something. A vast majority of the time, I will flip through all 6 programmed channels on my radio and every single one is on ad-break. So I decide to sit on one that I'll just wait through... but then I realize I've sat there for what feels like 5+ minutes (longer than one average song) still being bombarded with ads and justifyingly so decide that radio is no longer for me, and so off it goes for another year.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  AM radio is even worse. It’s descent into fringe talk radio turned the ad side of the business into prostate pills and ads that are probably fake. Radio used to mint money. I think what you’re seeing is the decline in the business led to consolidation, and now they are milking whatever they can get until they can sell the spectrum to someone.
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    It seems to me that AM still has an audience in people who are really into nutty conspiracy theories and/or religion. It might survive.
- rhino369 5y ago
  FM radio probably knows it, but what are they going to do? Nobody is going to start listening if they reduced ads. Best course to just squeeze every last dime out of the current listeners until you can't turn a profit anymore.

bartread 5y ago

> counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. ^^^This. I basically can't tolerate watching anything on ITV, Sky, or other commercial TV in the UK nowadays, nor for well over a decade, due to the frequency and quantity of ads. I also strongly object to what I presume is audio compression applied to ads to make them louder than surrounding scheduled programming. And counter programming is an obnoxious practice. Let's face it: lots of people have always wanted to watch what they want when they want to. Lots of people don't want to arrange their lives around the TV schedule. Good riddance to it.

Kye 5y ago
A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Failure to fix something can be innocent or malicious: someone high up can simply not prioritize it, and no one could honestly say it's to serve advertisers without an admission. Some of it is innocent, some isn't. Laws are passed to regulate it, but they find ways past it.
- Legion 5y ago
  > A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Weird how this supposed lack of normalization never seems to result in overly quiet commercials...
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    Like hospital billing errors always being in favor of the hospital.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  They use psycho-acoustics. It's not actually louder, in the sense of carrying more acoustic energy overall; but the sound-engineer emphasises those parts that we perceive as "loud". Regulators are pwned, and refuse to act. Movie sound-engineers seem to have started doing the same. I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle. [Edit] And advertisers hire loud, shouty actors to present their ads; it's almost as if they were challenging us to change channel or stick in a DVD.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Hmmm. That would be nice. I watched a one-hour show last night (with a 6-minute ad-break) that rolled titles at the 40-minute point. There followed a 10-minute ad-break, and 10 minutes of trailers. All of the ads were low-grade - hearing aids, wills and equity-release, and charity donation pitches.

iso1631 5y ago
> I watched a one-hour show last night Why? In the 80s there wasn't much choice, but today you can watch pretty much whatever you want when you want with no adverts, no catering for the lowest common denominator, and at least in the UK TV viewing has dropped so much that it's no longer needed to be social at work the next day (in the 80s everyone cared who shot dirty den or whatever in eastenders, as pretty much half the country watched it. Not so now)
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  * I don't work (retired) * I was in the mood for a Twilight Zone episode * I wasn't in the mood for that when I scheduled my recordings. I normally only watch news bulletins live. I don't have a feed of $EVERYTHING; I have Freesat and a bunch of basic Sky channels, with catchup services such as iPlayer. I cancelled Netflix. I'd subscribe to a service that offered $EVERYTHING, but it doesn't exist.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    > bunch of basic Sky channels Apparently £276 a year, more than I pay for netflix, amazon, disney and spend on "other" things (like discovery on apple). And for that price you still get adverts forced down your throat. Amazing.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  I've been rewatching random episodes of The Simpsons recently, and I have noticed that without ad breaks, the pacing is a bit off for a lot of episodes. The shows were designed so you had time to digest major plot points during the commercial breaks. Don't get me wrong I don't want to watch ads, but it's a strange and noticeable problem.

efitz 5y ago

You nailed it. From the footnotes in the article: “A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.” The biggest problem, IMO, with copyright in the current age is that the copyright holders want to adopt business models premised on controlling me and my experience. I’m not reluctant to paying for content, but if you make the experience suck I will work around you.

verelo 5y ago
This, 100% this, all the time, every day. Stop making buying your content so hard, impossible, or generally shit that it's easier to get illegally.
munk-a 5y ago
This is a large part, from my observation at least, of the reason why Game of Thrones was so insanely pirated. If you can recall a few years prior another nerd sensation was sweeping the country (Lost) - but by the time GoT came around Netflix and other streaming services were really coming into prominence. HBO Go in that era refused to offer you a la carte access - instead requiring you to have an account with a major cable company to gain the privilege to pay for access. I think the contrast is pretty clear because now we've got a plethora of independent streaming services with their own costs (like Dropout and Nebula) that don't seem to be having trouble attracting customers - even if it's just for a single series or creator (i.e. Dimension 20). The ease of access is a key point for me. I am morally opposed to piracy under normal circumstances - but if you're levying a price that I need to pay with my time or sanity I'm going to table flip and go back to the dark side (or, more likely in the modern day, just not watch your crap since there's plenty of stuff out there).
- heurisko 5y ago
  I agree. For the last series of GoT I bought a month pass from a streaming service in the UK--"Now TV" or something--to watch it. It was a reasonable price, so I think they were successful there. On the other hand, the last series was garbage.

athenot 5y ago

> and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV And now Instagram shows 1 ad every 3 posts/stories, which is getting closer to the ratio on TV.

munk-a 5y ago
There's a reason I don't use instagram - but also a reason I am forever thankful to my pi-hole.

a4isms 5y ago

A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared about: “You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.” My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes Music Store. It wasn’t peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners in content are always those who make it easy. p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going to a theatre!

thinkingkong 5y ago
I think this is also what makes Amazon so succesful. Their primary product is convenience. Not “stuff”.
- a4isms 5y ago
  With Prime, you can type the name of a product and get it right away.* ——— * For sufficiently next-day values of “right away.”