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:4, Funny)
-nB
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Interesting)
-nB
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
I did read the article, and saw that...But, don't you lose your Copyright to youtube and the like once you release it to their site?. I have to admit that I didn't read their terms of service, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Even if it's supposed to be the at the discretion of the copyright holder, how long till websites like youtube will see a great revenue stream and add it in without the consent of the copyright holder (or better said: by forcing the copyright holder to accept their terms). It's
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Interesting)
If they did this to every video they would quickly alienate their users. But if (say) 1 video in 100 had an advert added as you downloaded it, they could make a lot of money without losing too many users.
Advertisment may = income for artists on youtube (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Woohoo! Thanks Adobe!
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:5, Funny)
To really rub salt into the wounds, once you've waited through that, you find the rambling of said camwhore is about how much she hates tampons.
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.
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
If it's a pharma advertising a new drug they need at least that long to list the side-effects...
Re:Oh, come on! (Score:4, Informative)
It's just going to kill any service provider stupid enough to try to use this technology.
clever workaround (Score:5, Funny)
Re:clever workaround (Score:5, Insightful)
and Americans will still be telling me about how the terrorists "hate their freedom" ;)
Breacher of Contract! (Score:4, Interesting)
-Jamie Kellner, CEO of Turner Broadcasting
Sidenote: what does "watch the button" mean here?
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.
Re:That's Not How I Remember It (Score:4, Informative)
Your ears! (Score:2)
Re:clever workaround (Score:4, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Because those who get irritated enough to bypass it are not a good target audience for the ad?
Regards,
--
*Art
Re: (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:They need to focus on 5 second ads (Score:2, Interesting)
They could provide a hot-link or "add to favorites" capability for the people who want to learn more.
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Children's DVDs are bad for this. They have ads for tons of junk. It bothers me that they over-ride the controls so you can't just skip to the movie.
We'd probably own a few more DVDs if it wasn't just lame.
Next time I want a new movie, here's what I'll do:
1. Borrow it from the library / get it from
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, many new bands are signing up with indie labels that function more as cooperatives than "old school" labels and ensure
Re:Enforcing advertisements could be good (Score:5, Insightful)
Music videos *are* ads.
One more reason to shun Adobe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
really hate companies that spend so much effort on trying to make me do stuff they know I don't want to do
Yeah, like spending your money on what they sell.
They should just, like, host all your videos and stuff and give you MP3 music and DRM free HD movies and all that junk and not expect you to pay for it at all. Because you are giving them free advertising. Bands make money off of live shows. Real Artists aren't in it for the money. Patents are wrong. Copyright is theft. Outmoded distribution model.
Did I miss any talking points?
How about this: If someone posts a sci-fi trailer or the like, and it ha
Re: (Score:3)
Re:One more reason to shun Adobe (Score:5, Interesting)
Well this is really a problem for advertising. Am I more likely to buy products if you harass me with annoying ads? No. Yeah, yeah, talk about psychology and how people get conditioned, but I've worked in ad agencies and even the experts acknowledge it: ads have become so annoying that people are building up an immunity to them.
That why ads keep getting more and more outlandish-- ad agencies know that they have to get your attention somehow. Unfortunately, even e-mail campaigns that people have opted in to fail because people don't want to invest the time sorting that stuff from general spam. People are using modified host files and ad blockers to block even targetted advertisements because there are too many intolerable ads on the web. It isn't clear that people would bother developing such strict ad blocking if they were only receiving ads that they might be interested in. Even where there are no technical methods in place blocking ads, people have simply gotten better at ignoring them.
And so many advertisers have sought ways to deliver targetted advertisements, but unfortunately any method for targetting is usually seen as an invasion of privacy. No one really wants their personal preferences made public so that advertisers can profile them better.
And I know that very often people come back and say, "well they wouldn't use [spam|flash bannars|whatever] if it weren't effective!" There's some truth to that, but not as much as you might think. Often, people in advertising (at various levels) have trouble gauging the real success of a given campaign, but they sell their services on the basis of the number of views they've acheived. They tell their customers (the people who want their product advertised) that X number of people will view this ad. Y number of people will receive the e-mail. In fact, the advertisers who actually place the ad often have little interest in the success of the product itself or in the satisfaction of consumers. It's enough to convince their customer that the ad is being seen.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah... but now it's gotten into a bit of an arms race between advertisers and ad-blockers. There are now lots of technical means to simply block ads (which I do myself), but of course advertising is pretty vital to our economic system. Advertisers can't simply accept that they'll get no exposure and all of their ads will be blocked. Their entire purpose to is make the potential market aware of products, to shape public perception of products, etc.
The whole conflict really became apparent to me when I w
Heh... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
My wife won't use my firefox install as it is secure by default (no-ads, no script, etc.) and it's a PITA for a non techie to use (and for some mysterious reason hates AOL's mail server [sigh, yes she insists on keeping her AOL address] ). So she uses Mozilla and is happy with it. I sit down to help her with something from time to time and wham! ads. I instinctively right click the ad to add it to the block list...
-nB
Re: (Score:2)
Aside from a couple games that I can easily live without, I don't miss it. A few sites have intros that can't be viewed, but I skip those anyway because they are annoying wastes of time.
And best of all, I don't have to deal with the lack of a mute button in Flash.
Re: (Score:2)
It won't update/install WoW, I have to copy the folder over from Windows.
It doesn't crash in Master of Orion III or have the DirectX errors (whereas Windows after the first 2-4 hours of play in a given Windows install- cumulative, not per-session, it gets them every
Re: (Score:2)
Adblock Plus and Filterset.G.
That's not recommended to quote the Adblock Plus webpage:
Do I need to install Filterset.G Updater?
No. Actually, it is recommended not to use Filterset.G with Adblock Plus. There are several reasons for this:
* Filterset.G has been intentionally made incompatible with the built-in subscriptions feature in Adblock Plus, updating Filterset.G requires a separate extension which basically duplicates existing functionality.
* Filterset.G is not optimized for use with Adblock Plus, it will slow down your browsing considerably more than any other filter list.
* Filterset.G makes heavy use of very complicated regular expressions with the consequence that finding the source of problems is difficult and fixing those problems is even more so. In fact, Filterset.G is fixing most problems with exception rules which creates a problem on its own (see next point).
* Filterset.G contains a considerable number of exception rules. This is a big problem because exception rules cannot be overridden. It happened on several occasions that exception rules from Filterset.G whitelisted actual ads making these ads unblockable -- something users usually blamed Adblock Plus for.
While Filterset.G has had its uses in the past, nowadays other filter lists are certainly a better choice. If you already have Filterset.G Updater installed, you can uninstall the extension and remove the Filterset.G subscription in the Adblock Plus Preferences dialog. Feel free to choose any subscription from the list then.
gnash to rescue (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [gnu.org]
Because...? (Score:2)
So here's the riddle. If a content provider wants to force you to use adverts, they will force you - Gnash won't help. If they don't want to force you, Gnash is unnecessary. So what, exactly, does this have to do with...well...anything?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Because they have found that in order to purchase information about targeted groups costs more than just information about a larger unspecified group. The returns are about the same regardless (somewhere between 1 and 2% on average and up to
Re: (Score:2)
Have no illusions...
Re: (Score:3)
Actually one of the goals of advertising is to spark interest that was not there in the first place.
The older you get the less susceptable you are to this (and you are more set in your ways), and that's why most of the advertising seems to be targeted at 12 year old girls.
Why do they keep trying? (Score:4, Insightful)
Coming soon, to a codec pack near you:
FlashAlternative.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
48 hours (Score:5, Insightful)
Cannot force anything. (Score:5, Interesting)
Fine, then I do not want to watch the content at all. I am willing to be lots of other people feel the same way. And considering the scale of amateur content production these days, I think there is plenty of room and sponsorship for alternative sites.
Damned Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Damned Flash (Score:4, Insightful)
Minor correction: Flash doesn't support your primary OS.
Carry on.
Re: (Score:2)
- Totem often has the GStreamer backend, which in turn often does not have the codecs 99% of all people use. OK, geeks can refit them, but this is not about this group.
- VLC has ZERO controls. No play, pause, volume,
- MPlayer crashes, too often. When I use the mplayer plugin, I always stop before visiting a site with a video. Its especially bad when one closes a tab which is currently playing a video.
- gxine opens a new window (which is the worst solution possible), an
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?!?
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Real, WMV, ASF, AVI, OGG, MPEG, MOV, H.264, Theora, etc. Universal standards are great, because there's so many of them to choose from! Oh wait...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But the real question is... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Enforced not watching (Score:5, Funny)
Make ads the content. Problem solved. (MTV was founded on this business model.)
-Isaac
Re: (Score:2)
-nB
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I like flash (Score:2)
As a result of that decision, though, I tend to not visit sites that rely heavily on flash. For instance, I still us Yahoo finance instead of Google finance. Due to historical reasons, flash used to crash
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: (Score:2)
The user likes the new features, you're confusing user and product (the latter being the viewers).
-nB
Re: (Score:2)
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.)
Vote with your feet. (Score:2)
Let the rebels of the world invent something better that's free and non oppressive.
Sooner or later people with decide enough is enough but they better make it sooner while they still can.
Time for a pitchfork and torch rally up to the mountain...
Flash has *always* had enforced ad viewing (Score:5, Informative)
There goes Flash down the drain. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
and USERS are now free to hate your outfit (Score:2)
it's now time for the market to test this. users won't buy it, then adobe and the web sites that put this silly slop into play will be branded as total assholes in no time.
let the marketplace work....
I hope (Score:2)
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.
Could this help kill Flash? (Score:2)
The only way Flash will go away is by people not watching whatever is delivered through that medium. Be it through blocking the technology or using another, voting with your dollar is what decides how these formats will survive. When I read this, I tend to think that this will only serve to bothe
Wow. Slashdotters miss the point (again) (Score:4, Informative)
Problems with Adobe (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe is already showing what sort of company they are with the release of their very first suite since the acquisition of Macromedia. Their software has gotten significantly more expensive, it's overloaded with bloat and they've managed to outdo Microsoft with all the versions of their software. An Adobe representative, addressing criticisms of a $500 increase in one of the packages, essentially said that people will pay the extra money because they're Adobe. The gist of it is that we're paying more because we've got no choice. If I could find the link I'd post it here.
Unfortunately, designers by and large aren't particularly savvy. They're the kind of people to constantly criticize Microsoft just because it's trendy but then happily bend over for Adobe and Apple. So I doubt this will ever change.
People like to point out alternatives to Adobe products, but they forget some basic points. Compatibility is essential. I can't go off and use my own software only to not have clients or other designers not be able to handle my files. It's already bad enough with Adobe forcing companies to upgrade by limiting compatibility between versions. I may not have problems 90% of the time, but that 10% that trouble arises is a huge deal in my business. So I have to go with what everyone else is using.
And another fact is that despite the bloat present in current Adobe products their software is still reasonable well designed and works seamlessly. I can't say that about anything else I've tried. And most others are even worse with bloat trying to cram all these pointless features into the application. But the biggest problem I've encountered is that they all have poorly designed interfaces.
Despite it's problems Flash is an excellent tool. It runs well on most systems. There might be a person or two who's running a system that doesn't support it. But to criticize something because it doesn't support 1% or 2% of the market is a bit ridiculous to be honest. The fact is that on any platform that supports Flash it's a guarantee that in almost every single case the application is going to be identical. It's going to look the same and it's going to run exactly the same way. You can't really say the same thing about Java or anything else. I don't have to worry about supporting specific platforms. I build something once and I'm done.
I do welcome competitors, however. I'm not happy with the direction Adobe is heading in. and this nonsense of enforced advertising is just one of many problems. I fully expect this sort of thing to become prevalent whether we like it or not. Because, like I've already mentioned, Adobe now has a monopoly over the design industry. And every marketing company out there is without a doubt eager to cram advertising down our collective throats.
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.
Not new; just a common interface (Score:3, Informative)
Mochi Media has been offering a service for ads like this for the past 5 months, but it's being used mostly for casual games.
Hmph! (Score:2)
[makes mental note not to update Flash anymore]
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: (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.
All content cannot be free (Score:3, Interesting)
This won't force you to watch ads -- yet (Score:4, Interesting)
Movies could be bundled with DRM that limits viewers to 4 and would shut off the display if a group
of 6 people were sensed. Youtube could require the display to sense the presence of a person during
the ad or the video won't play. No more reaching for a snack while the ad plays!
You read it here on Slashdot first!
Loss of viewship coming to flash videos. (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I the only one that hates the move to video everywhere on the Internet? If I wanted video, I would watch TV. I get news from the Internet because I can at a glance decide which item I want more information on, of the dozens of items listed, and I can skim it or look through the whole thing based on my interest. With video, you lose all that. And, on the odd occasion I do check the video, I'm shocked at the low quality people are willing to put up with.
When I go to cnn.com, half the stories linked there are to videos. If I go to espn.com, it automatically loads a video advertisement and starts playing it (don't check espn.com at work, the audio blasting from your PC alerts everyone within 30 feet that you're goofing off). A good percentage of the links at digg.com are video (and a high percentage of the rest is garbage).
No thanks. I already use flashblock, to avoid most videos and advertisements. I also changed my site viewing habits to avoid primarily video sites.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (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 webs
Re:They can enforce viewing of ads... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Well then you just won't be allowed to view the 'protected content.' And this pretty much kills off both free flash projects with one stroke. Sure they will struggle on a bit outside the US but no distribution will touch em now. Best case scenario is after the DRMis cracked and included in the free players they will be available post install to those who know how to add in the unfree/non-us repos.
Re:Flashblock firefox plugin: view only what you w (Score:2)