5 ms·

What's the difference between this and paying 100 bucks a month to DirectTV? I'm paying 100 bucks each month for the service, why does DirectTV bombard me with

by 16s 14y ago

What's the difference between this and paying 100 bucks a month to DirectTV? I'm paying 100 bucks each month for the service, why does DirectTV bombard me with ads every few minutes? It seems logical that if DirectTV can behave that way and get away with it, then Microsoft can too.

archangel_one 14y ago
The fact that you're getting a bad deal from DirectTV doesn't make everyone else's bad deals okay as well.
- majormajor 14y ago
  I'd much rather see ads during TV than have to personally cover much more of the cost producing the shows I want to watch. Just keep in mind that there are other perspectives out there. I know some people hate ads and would rather pay more, and I don't blame them for that, but I'm largely the opposite. (This breaks down some for internet display ads where there are privacy concerns with the data being tracked, unlike with broadcast-to-everyone TV ads; I'm not aware of how much data is shared between advertisers and such with this program for W8 apps to know just how big of an issue that might be.)
  - CrankyPants 14y ago
    I've moved to paying for content. In fact, at one point I shut off all content I wasn't directly paying for. A few things happened: • The S/N got astonishingly better. • The time spent on it was much lower. • What I got out of it was more nuanced, and impacted me more deeply. Now, a few other things happened: I missed some things, some of which was good (well-reasoned debates on HN, for example), some of which was the equivalent of junk food (tech news updates), but still not without some utility and applicability. I also decided some of my subscription content really wasn't worth it, because it started to feel an awful lot closer to the ad supported stuff I'd just detox'd off of, than the higher quality stuff I was paying for. I also missed some really, really good 'blogs from people who are respected industry figures, and run the 'blog more to make sure they stay respected industry figures, than to directly profit from them. Those are back in the (much reduced) fray. Which is all to say: I think if we paid directly for the content we consumed on TV, it could work out OK. And, once the industry realizes its model is unsustainable, everything will cost less to produce, and, hopefully, buy. (Think of sending $5-7 to an artist for their album, as opposed to paying ≥$10-15 to pay a lot of guys whose ability to add value is ever declining.) I'd just as soon watch 2-3 really superb TV shows per week and pay $100-300/year than spend that (or more) for the same stuff, plus a whole lot of noise and bloat. I think we'd come out of the other end better for it, and with more to show. At the risk of being hastily axiomatic, I could say that everyone's beholden to someone. Or, at least, content creators who want to be paid for their work, are. I'd rather they be primarily beholden to the customer, than to the advertiser, or the political climate and/or government, etc. Any other arrangement, to me, seems too compromised, if for no other reason than because a direct wallet-vote seems to be the most powerful.
    - majormajor 14y ago
      I didn't do it by drawing a line between paid content and content-with-advertising, but over the past two years I've also dramatically cut the amount of TV I watch. I watch about one to three hours of non-sports television per week, on Hulu Plus or Netflix. My sports-watching is mostly background material while doing other stuff, and I don't have cable, but subscribe to things like MLB.TV for it, which (like Hulu Plus or cable) is a paid + advertising model. I did it as an experiment when moving to see how long I could get by without cable and a DVR and hours of TV shows per week, and found out I just didn't miss it that much at all. But for the stuff I do watch, I enjoy the big production budgets that advertising pays for. But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do. Commercials just pretty much wash over me (and internet banner ads I usually don't even notice at all). Sure, there's a not-really-personally-noticed branding effect, especially with interruptive TV ads, but I just don't care if my purchase of paper towels or whatever ends up subconsciously influenced by commercials. But, all that said, and more back to the original topic, ads in apps are one of the areas where I'm more frequently willing to pay to remove them. It's a question of consuming versus using, and wanting to maximize my screen space. And I think it's fascinating how easily iOS and Android (I don't remember any ads in Symbian smartphone apps, though I never really used Windows Mobile, so maybe they were there?) slipped the idea of in-app ads into the world, after the desktop app world avoided them for so long.
      - CrankyPants 14y ago
        But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do. I agree, but I also factor my time, patience, stress levels, and other things into the cost. (That said, I'm probably more bothered by this stuff than most, so my costs are not your costs.) Where I disagree is that I think big production stuff can happen without ad dollars, but without data to support it, I'm just supposing. And I also think that, on a per-dollar basis, we might even wind up paying less. Similarly suppositional, but I think we underestimate the amount of ad budgets baked into products we'd buy either way, the amount of worthless junk we pay for–either directly, or indirectly–but wouldn't, if our collective view of things was a bit more grounded and mature, and so on. And, yeah, a trojan horse in the shape of shiny phones has certainly done wonders for that. All I can think is that perhaps desktop apps being more the domain of earlier adopters and business users, at least relative to phone sales, must be part of it. That said, developers were doing it before iOS had an ad network, and before Android, so one could take the good-faith assumption that they were more concerned about developers making bad, annoying ads that would spoil it for everyone else (I vaguely remember Apple making some comments about that at the time), and I'm sure Google didn't want someone besides them controlling how things were presented and doing a bad job of it. I assume that everyone is doing what they think is in their own best interest. I'm just not sure consumers are, on balance, right in their assumptions.
  - archangel_one 14y ago
    Sure, I think most people aren't that unhappy about TV ads. I very possibly get a better deal from ITV at £0/year plus ads than £145/year to the BBC with no ads. $100/month and ads seemed pretty expensive to me, that's all - but really my point was just that regardless of what the parent poster pays for TV and still gets ads, that doesn't justify similar behaviour in a completely different industry.
- 16s 14y ago
  It's not just me. It's tens of millions of paying customers. The other pay TV services are the same. It matters not what the example is, the point is that companies display ads to paying customers and have for some time now. So we should not be surprised when other companies start doing this.
  - CrankyPants 14y ago
    Surprise ≠ dismay.
mattmanser 14y ago
When cable came out it was billed as no-ads. Greed gets in the way, as a consumer you've got too little power to say no. It's use the service with ads or get nothing. It's exploitation, but what can you do? In my opinion forced ads are an overall societal drain, a niggling little evil cheapening all our lives, but as I said, what can you do?
- canistr 14y ago
  I wouldn't say it's necessarily an overall societal drain. While I'm not a fan of seeing ads, there IS value added when you get to use an app for free under condition the ad is served to you. And it stops most people from pirating the software. Consider if Photoshop had ads. Yes it's a ridiculous concept but hear me out. For most people, a Photoshop license is not priced in such a way for them to get it. Not everyone can get the student license. But what if you had an ad-supported version to allow you to use it? For people to try it out and open their doors to image editing, that would be a great experience. The alternative being pirating or using smaller programs or ones without the same industry-vetting.
  - CrankyPants 14y ago
    I think it is an overall societal drain, and we're just in the early stages of it. Photoshop is an interesting example to me, because I count Photoshop as another model that has had to change with the times: it used to be for pure professionals only, at a time when professionals often worked for companies that bought their licenses. Like the sports tickets of software. Crazy expensive, but if you did it as a full-time job, it was more than easily absorbed. After all, it required expensive (and technically challenging) hardware to run it on, so that barrier was already crossed by potential customers. Today, everyone's a designer. Alright, that's not a fair assessment, but the number of people who have design skills–ranging from minor editing to some real mind-blowing stuff–but don't depend on them to feed their family, is astonishingly high compared to just a couple of decades ago. People who never consider themselves graphic artists find a lot of utility value in Photoshop, or one of its offshoots. So its old price point, relative to everything else, just doesn't make sense if broad adoption is their goal, unless they're totally happy to capture just the pure pro crowd, who, for perspective, can run it quite handily on hardware that costs what a night or two in a mid-grade hotel in any big city does. The technical and cost barriers have fallen dramatically. So that's changing. Now, consider if Photoshop were ad-supported, and had been so for long enough to where designers grew up with that being the new normal. Then, imagine someone comes out with an ad-free image-editing program, with no ads, that costs a reasonable amount. In some ways, better than Photoshop, in other ways, probably not as specialized, not as built-out, but pretty solid. I think there's a market there for the taking. Adobe's trying to strike that balance, and I'm not here to say whether or not they're doing a good job at it with their current approach (that's a much longer post and I doubt my ability to think about it as clearly as I believe I can other segments of the industry), but my point is that well-made products at a reasonable price is something I still want to believe there's a huge market for. And we tend to underestimate it because of all the sub-par stuff, our conditioning to which we don't even realize. I'd like to think that enough humanity still has the innate thoughtfulness to be slightly skeptical when being pitched to trade hours of their life (that is, the money they earned by working) for a given product, to provide a market for it. And if we've all reached the point where we'll happily trade our time, attention spans, compromise our abilities to focus and concentrate, and reveal a wealth of personal data so as to pay a bit less, well, then we get what we deserve. But that's probably outside the scope of this particular comment. Edit: Fixed a typo.
CrankyPants 14y ago
Who's saying there's a difference? That there isn't is the point. In fact, if there is a difference, it's that operating systems are far more integrated into both my personal and professional lives, both in terms of time and functional integration. The last thing I want is for the rest of my life to be as whored out and substance-free as television.

by 16s 14y ago

archangel_one 14y ago

The fact that you're getting a bad deal from DirectTV doesn't make everyone else's bad deals okay as well.

majormajor 14y ago
I'd much rather see ads during TV than have to personally cover much more of the cost producing the shows I want to watch. Just keep in mind that there are other perspectives out there. I know some people hate ads and would rather pay more, and I don't blame them for that, but I'm largely the opposite. (This breaks down some for internet display ads where there are privacy concerns with the data being tracked, unlike with broadcast-to-everyone TV ads; I'm not aware of how much data is shared between advertisers and such with this program for W8 apps to know just how big of an issue that might be.)
- CrankyPants 14y ago
  I've moved to paying for content. In fact, at one point I shut off all content I wasn't directly paying for. A few things happened: • The S/N got astonishingly better. • The time spent on it was much lower. • What I got out of it was more nuanced, and impacted me more deeply. Now, a few other things happened: I missed some things, some of which was good (well-reasoned debates on HN, for example), some of which was the equivalent of junk food (tech news updates), but still not without some utility and applicability. I also decided some of my subscription content really wasn't worth it, because it started to feel an awful lot closer to the ad supported stuff I'd just detox'd off of, than the higher quality stuff I was paying for. I also missed some really, really good 'blogs from people who are respected industry figures, and run the 'blog more to make sure they stay respected industry figures, than to directly profit from them. Those are back in the (much reduced) fray. Which is all to say: I think if we paid directly for the content we consumed on TV, it could work out OK. And, once the industry realizes its model is unsustainable, everything will cost less to produce, and, hopefully, buy. (Think of sending $5-7 to an artist for their album, as opposed to paying ≥$10-15 to pay a lot of guys whose ability to add value is ever declining.) I'd just as soon watch 2-3 really superb TV shows per week and pay $100-300/year than spend that (or more) for the same stuff, plus a whole lot of noise and bloat. I think we'd come out of the other end better for it, and with more to show. At the risk of being hastily axiomatic, I could say that everyone's beholden to someone. Or, at least, content creators who want to be paid for their work, are. I'd rather they be primarily beholden to the customer, than to the advertiser, or the political climate and/or government, etc. Any other arrangement, to me, seems too compromised, if for no other reason than because a direct wallet-vote seems to be the most powerful.
  - majormajor 14y ago
    I didn't do it by drawing a line between paid content and content-with-advertising, but over the past two years I've also dramatically cut the amount of TV I watch. I watch about one to three hours of non-sports television per week, on Hulu Plus or Netflix. My sports-watching is mostly background material while doing other stuff, and I don't have cable, but subscribe to things like MLB.TV for it, which (like Hulu Plus or cable) is a paid + advertising model. I did it as an experiment when moving to see how long I could get by without cable and a DVR and hours of TV shows per week, and found out I just didn't miss it that much at all. But for the stuff I do watch, I enjoy the big production budgets that advertising pays for. But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do. Commercials just pretty much wash over me (and internet banner ads I usually don't even notice at all). Sure, there's a not-really-personally-noticed branding effect, especially with interruptive TV ads, but I just don't care if my purchase of paper towels or whatever ends up subconsciously influenced by commercials. But, all that said, and more back to the original topic, ads in apps are one of the areas where I'm more frequently willing to pay to remove them. It's a question of consuming versus using, and wanting to maximize my screen space. And I think it's fascinating how easily iOS and Android (I don't remember any ads in Symbian smartphone apps, though I never really used Windows Mobile, so maybe they were there?) slipped the idea of in-app ads into the world, after the desktop app world avoided them for so long.
    - CrankyPants 14y ago
      But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do. I agree, but I also factor my time, patience, stress levels, and other things into the cost. (That said, I'm probably more bothered by this stuff than most, so my costs are not your costs.) Where I disagree is that I think big production stuff can happen without ad dollars, but without data to support it, I'm just supposing. And I also think that, on a per-dollar basis, we might even wind up paying less. Similarly suppositional, but I think we underestimate the amount of ad budgets baked into products we'd buy either way, the amount of worthless junk we pay for–either directly, or indirectly–but wouldn't, if our collective view of things was a bit more grounded and mature, and so on. And, yeah, a trojan horse in the shape of shiny phones has certainly done wonders for that. All I can think is that perhaps desktop apps being more the domain of earlier adopters and business users, at least relative to phone sales, must be part of it. That said, developers were doing it before iOS had an ad network, and before Android, so one could take the good-faith assumption that they were more concerned about developers making bad, annoying ads that would spoil it for everyone else (I vaguely remember Apple making some comments about that at the time), and I'm sure Google didn't want someone besides them controlling how things were presented and doing a bad job of it. I assume that everyone is doing what they think is in their own best interest. I'm just not sure consumers are, on balance, right in their assumptions.
- archangel_one 14y ago
  Sure, I think most people aren't that unhappy about TV ads. I very possibly get a better deal from ITV at £0/year plus ads than £145/year to the BBC with no ads. $100/month and ads seemed pretty expensive to me, that's all - but really my point was just that regardless of what the parent poster pays for TV and still gets ads, that doesn't justify similar behaviour in a completely different industry.
16s 14y ago
It's not just me. It's tens of millions of paying customers. The other pay TV services are the same. It matters not what the example is, the point is that companies display ads to paying customers and have for some time now. So we should not be surprised when other companies start doing this.
- CrankyPants 14y ago
  Surprise ≠ dismay.

mattmanser 14y ago

When cable came out it was billed as no-ads. Greed gets in the way, as a consumer you've got too little power to say no. It's use the service with ads or get nothing. It's exploitation, but what can you do? In my opinion forced ads are an overall societal drain, a niggling little evil cheapening all our lives, but as I said, what can you do?

canistr 14y ago
I wouldn't say it's necessarily an overall societal drain. While I'm not a fan of seeing ads, there IS value added when you get to use an app for free under condition the ad is served to you. And it stops most people from pirating the software. Consider if Photoshop had ads. Yes it's a ridiculous concept but hear me out. For most people, a Photoshop license is not priced in such a way for them to get it. Not everyone can get the student license. But what if you had an ad-supported version to allow you to use it? For people to try it out and open their doors to image editing, that would be a great experience. The alternative being pirating or using smaller programs or ones without the same industry-vetting.
- CrankyPants 14y ago
  I think it is an overall societal drain, and we're just in the early stages of it. Photoshop is an interesting example to me, because I count Photoshop as another model that has had to change with the times: it used to be for pure professionals only, at a time when professionals often worked for companies that bought their licenses. Like the sports tickets of software. Crazy expensive, but if you did it as a full-time job, it was more than easily absorbed. After all, it required expensive (and technically challenging) hardware to run it on, so that barrier was already crossed by potential customers. Today, everyone's a designer. Alright, that's not a fair assessment, but the number of people who have design skills–ranging from minor editing to some real mind-blowing stuff–but don't depend on them to feed their family, is astonishingly high compared to just a couple of decades ago. People who never consider themselves graphic artists find a lot of utility value in Photoshop, or one of its offshoots. So its old price point, relative to everything else, just doesn't make sense if broad adoption is their goal, unless they're totally happy to capture just the pure pro crowd, who, for perspective, can run it quite handily on hardware that costs what a night or two in a mid-grade hotel in any big city does. The technical and cost barriers have fallen dramatically. So that's changing. Now, consider if Photoshop were ad-supported, and had been so for long enough to where designers grew up with that being the new normal. Then, imagine someone comes out with an ad-free image-editing program, with no ads, that costs a reasonable amount. In some ways, better than Photoshop, in other ways, probably not as specialized, not as built-out, but pretty solid. I think there's a market there for the taking. Adobe's trying to strike that balance, and I'm not here to say whether or not they're doing a good job at it with their current approach (that's a much longer post and I doubt my ability to think about it as clearly as I believe I can other segments of the industry), but my point is that well-made products at a reasonable price is something I still want to believe there's a huge market for. And we tend to underestimate it because of all the sub-par stuff, our conditioning to which we don't even realize. I'd like to think that enough humanity still has the innate thoughtfulness to be slightly skeptical when being pitched to trade hours of their life (that is, the money they earned by working) for a given product, to provide a market for it. And if we've all reached the point where we'll happily trade our time, attention spans, compromise our abilities to focus and concentrate, and reveal a wealth of personal data so as to pay a bit less, well, then we get what we deserve. But that's probably outside the scope of this particular comment. Edit: Fixed a typo.

CrankyPants 14y ago

Who's saying there's a difference? That there isn't is the point. In fact, if there is a difference, it's that operating systems are far more integrated into both my personal and professional lives, both in terms of time and functional integration. The last thing I want is for the rest of my life to be as whored out and substance-free as television.