Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players 397
Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."
Oh, come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
That will kill self-made videos in no time. Who really wants to wait through a 3 minute ad for tampons to watch a 2 minute rambing of a camwhore? I certainly don't want to do that.
Not that I care, I have put exactly one video of on youtube. I just had a dash of inspiration. Probably will never happen again.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't necessarily have to be mandated to watch the commercials, there is just an option to force it now. Copyright holders who are releasing self-made videos won't have to opt-in (depending on how any of the video sharing sites' (GooTube's) management decides to handle this I suppose) to allow the ads.
I think that this is a pointless move. Flash video exploded because it was fast and there weren't forcible ads and DRM.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
One more reason to shun Adobe (Score:5, Insightful)
Forced Ads...Forced Consumers? (Score:5, Insightful)
What ever happened to the idea of targeting willing people? I'm not interested in whatever you want to sell me, so don't waste your time or mine forcing me to watch an advertisement. If anything, you'll make me less likely to purchase whatever it is you want me to buy.
If people were interested, they would watch the ads and make careful decisions. Yet, some people seem to think that we need to be strapped to chairs and have our eyes forced open to watch Big Brother ala 1984 tell us the "Good News" of whatever it is that Big Corp. wants to sell me.
Why do they keep trying? (Score:4, Insightful)
Coming soon, to a codec pack near you:
FlashAlternative.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Woohoo! Thanks Adobe!
48 hours (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:clever workaround (Score:5, Insightful)
and Americans will still be telling me about how the terrorists "hate their freedom" ;)
Damned Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
Enforced not watching (Score:5, Insightful)
10% ad load is not so bad (say 10 seconds for a 100 second video). That's what the ad load was like for television back in the 1950's and 1960's.
Advertisers have pushed it way past 33%. In some cases the ad load is almost 50%.
How can they even expect us to bother wading through 50% ads to get to content?
NEXT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Bonus question for 100 bucks: When you force user A, using product B, to do things he doesn't want to do while there are a billion alternatives for B, will user A keep using product B?
Re:Enforcing advertisements could be good (Score:3, Insightful)
They seem to buy television advertising space all of the time, despite that it can be easily skipped or ignored or, in some cases, circumvented entirely by downloading from the iTS or a similar service. They do it because it can be less trouble to watch the add than to skip it.
Re:I'm all for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Who said anything about capatilism? Last I checked we lived in a socialist state. After all... In a true capitalist free market, it wouldn't be illegal to bypass DRM and companies wouldn't get paid anything unless they actually made a sale rather than tax compensation for "theoretical losses" due to piracy.
The death of youtube is greatly exaggerated (Score:3, Insightful)
What this basically does is make it harder to copy your favorite clips from the daily show and late night with david letterman to Youtube very quickly. Now, you have to be a cracker who breaks the DRM and THEN posts it to Youtube.
Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
(Sorry for angry tone, I'm just tired of things like this.)
Re:Damned Flash (Score:4, Insightful)
Minor correction: Flash doesn't support your primary OS.
Carry on.
Flash video players are a horrible user interface (Score:5, Insightful)
And the players themselves, ugh. Notice how they all look like the QuickTime or Windows Media players, but the controls don't really work? Try and fast forward or reverse reverse playback. Sometimes the play/pause barely work. The Flash video players have the familiar video controls, but they're quite often no better than fake plastic ones glued to the screen.
Let "Capitalism" cure this (Score:4, Insightful)
If enough people do this, then it will go away.
The "free market" works when consumers view themselves as citizens instead of sheep.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing I hate is that on sites like gamespot, you have to watch an advertisement before you can watch a videogame trailer... which in itself is also an advertisement.
Hopefully this will start to kill internet video. There is nothing more I would enjoy more than seeing all these idiots who think the world wants to watch a 14 year old girl talk about how tough life is for two hours a day from her bedroom or some 70 year old moron singing and dancing suddenly go away.
That's Not How I Remember It (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if he thinks I'm breaking some sort of contract in his head because I never so much as channel surf past his network, much less ever stop there.
Non-crap ads? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't hate ads though, just being forced to watch them (especially ads that suck). Hell, I have several hundred megs of downloaded advertisements... the ones that are actually quite funny/amusing. Every now and then I shared them with my friends.
I also had somebody recently show me a clip of some type of "ad awards." It's about 1h30 long, and it's *all* ads. I only had time to catch about 30 minutes of it, but I just about wet myself laughing at some of the better ones
The solution here is not to make ads the consumer can't skip... that just pisses the consumer of. The solution is to make ads that the consumer *WANTS* to watch... the type that has somebody yelling across the room "hey Bob, get back here quick, that new Bud Light commercial I was telling you about is coming on"
Re:Damned Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
This will never take off... (Score:4, Insightful)
If YouTube started displaying forced ads before their user-made videos, something tells me they'd have very sudden and very large drop in market share. It would then be in someone else's interest to start up a site without ads.
Re:Enforcing advertisements could be good (Score:5, Insightful)
Music videos *are* ads.
Re:Damned Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is that? I much prefer segregating most media types to their own program and window. I bloody hate it when I'm using a Windows machine and I click on a Word or PDF file, and the entire app is embedded *into* the web browser. What dumbass thought *that* was a clever idea?!?
Bitching and Moaning (Score:4, Insightful)
First, a lot of websites like ESPN and CNN already do this, so this I fail to see how this is big news.
Second, how is this different from TV?
Third, as much as we would like to ignore it, maintaining a websites and producing content cost money. Even good old Slashdot relies on ad revenue to stay afloat. Like TV, the only other choice we have is a pay-for-content scheme, and personally, I'd rather deal with ads then have to maintain subscriptions to the 20 or so websites I visit regularly. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Here's some advice for you ad-challenged people. Get Adblock; it blocks 90% of the ads you'll ever have the potential to see. For the other 10%, just ignore them or surf another website until they are over. You may be forced to sit through the ad, but your not forced to pay attention to it.
Re:clever workaround (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm all for this (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way you can get all this stuff for FREE is if you're going through your neighbor's open WiFi. Remember that usually people pay a monthly fee for internet access. The host of your favorite website pays even more depending on bandwidth. Nothing has ever been FREE, troll. The thing is some people want to make a few billion and be the next Google, and they're not afraid to degrade the quality of our browsing to do it.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:2, Insightful)
As copyrighted content becomes more prolific on the site, some entities (unlike Viacom) will realize that it would be much more profitable to put authentic videos up on youtube that are subsidized with ads rather then letting other people do it and then suing their cut out of the company.
But seriously, ads in John Doe's video of his baby eating cereal? Hell no. That would piss people off to no end, and let me tell you, there are a million sites out there that really want to be the next YouTube.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
I respectfully disagree, It's an optional feature. Nothing is being stated that it will be used by masses of people. However, I can see that you're trying to go for the 'obtrusive' part as being a big downside, which is true.
First, even TV commercials only last 15-30 seconds. They just play 5-6 different commercials in a row. The online advertisers are often doing something different. Checkout ABC's website. You can watch Lost, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate House Wives, and other shows, which include 2-3 30's commercials. I've watched these from time to time, and to tell you the truth, they're anything but bothering. The commercial MUST play through the full 30 seconds to access the next segment of the show. But the commercial stops and you must click a button to continue. So, like TV commercials, you can getup and take a break (of course, you can pause the video and do it anyways). From what I've already seen, these commercials are not that bad.
Of course, that doesn't mean there won't be bad commercials out there. The internet is a different media that attracts people differently and advertisement agencies will have to make sure they design their ads to be attractive and programmers will have to make sure they don't slam the user with too many.
Good point, which is why they probably won't have ads on things that are not worth it. Also, it could probably also be designed like some popular sites that give you a full page 'ad' and make you click a link to go to the content, but do not show you another full page ad until 'x' minutes or you enter a different popular microsite. I would doubt video ads are going to be placed on most of YouTube videos. They'll probably stick to the unobtrusive text ads.
Cheers,
Fozzy
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, bandwidth isn't free, and they are hosting YOUR videos for free. If they want to put an ad on it, so be it. Go post your videos somewhere else. I am sure your homemade video of someone trying to light a fart on fire is really good, but YouTube will survive without it.
Why is it that anytime a company wants to break even or actually make a profit, it is called "greed"?
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:2, Insightful)
It will a decade before adobe release a linux player though...
Re:Bitching and Moaning (Score:3, Insightful)
It's no problem if you have to watch an ad or two before the feature right?
Well, how about when you pay $15 to see a movie - for that price you should get a DVD on your way out - and then you have to sit through 15-20 min. of ads? Ads to subsidize... the poor theatre that's barely making a ton of money hand over fist for admissions and $3 candy bars anyway?
It's greedy. It's arrogant. It's a waste of my time, and I refuse to put up with it.
Re:They can enforce viewing of ads... (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, and here's a newsflash, Skippy:- Just because someone doesn't like Linux, it doesn't mean they haven't tried it or they use Windows. Sometimes, things don't work the way people want it to. Sorry to bust your bubble. I used Ubuntu for all of an hour, most of which was getting my USB keyboard to work. No dice.
I suspect you use Kubuntu as your primary OS, don't you? Try going out in the fresh air for a couple of hours, and see if your perspective doesn't change a bit. Trust me, it's got to be the least difficult thing you'd ever do without your computer, and there's no little to no risk of permanent trauma. Just open your front door, and that's it.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, Flash video exploded because it was the only true cross-platform embeddable video format, and it offered quality at least equal to and in most cases better than the competition. So, rather than dealing with encoding QuickTime for Mac, Windows Media and Real for PC, and whatever else for Linux, you just do one format and you're done. And, it'll play right in the browser without you doing anything else.
There was never any promise of no DRM and no forced ads. In fact, another reason why content owners like it is that it's very difficult to capture a stream, unless you do it wrong (YouTube actually does it wrong - they don't obfuscate their url's, allowing plugins to easily save a file. But it's easy to hide url's if you want to).
Anyway, you guys are going nuts over nothing. This has nothing to do with user-generated stuff. It's pre-roll. It's going to actually result in *more* video being available on the net, because now content owners have a financial incentive. All those TV channels hesitant to put their stuff on YouTube? Well, you're gonna see a lot more deals done now. And meanwhile, the skateboarding videos and vlogs you're so used to will continue to look exactly the same.
Advertisment may = income for artists on youtube (Score:3, Insightful)