> The ad reductions will occur in news programming, late-night NBC and Bravo shows, reality programming, competition shows like America’s Got Talent and other cable originals.
The only reason they're doing this is they don't have enough buyers to fill the slots. Traditional media is great for brand advertising, but it's so hard to show ROI, I can see the wisdom to shifting budget to Facebook and Google.
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.
Is it really a bad idea? Will people actually get off Facebook and watch more TV if the ads were shorter? I suspect ads aren't the reason TV viewing is declining and aren't going to accelerate it much.
> almost everything except sports, without advertising breaks.
And local news which is important to a sizeable demographic. And advertising is now coming to a number of platforms - not yet within shows but give it time!
To me the article read as if cable as it was at the time of writing had minimal advertising, but networks were planning to introduce more of them. I thought it fit the comparison with Youtube slowly ramping up ads really well.
>Hulu only has commercials on their second-run (day-after-air) content from broadcast sources. They have a substantial back catalogue of stuff that doesn't include said commercials.
Did they change to this recently? I had a Hulu Plus subscription a couple of years ago and they had ads interrupting everything, regardless of date.
If they've removed ads from their back catalog I may consider re-subscribing...
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.
For the live stream, the ads will be the same as those on the traditional television broadcast. For the on-demand programming, the typical 12 to 16 minutes of ads an hour will be reduced 25 percent.
I guess I'm not their intended customer. I'm not going to pay for a service to give me ads. If I'm watching a live show, I want the ability to pause it, walk away for a few minutes, and then skip commercials.
For on-demand content, I don't want any commercials. I don't see the value otherwise.
> (“there’s an election soon” ads, “we’re building a new piece of civil infrastructure” ads, etc.) I actually kind of like that; I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I would see them anywhere else.
I don't have cable, either, but I do have a pair of rabbit ears to keep up with local news via OTA broadcasts.
Also, how about not having to see the same ad three times during a given show? At this point maybe we're getting too close to tivo for the advertisers to feel comfortable.
If they had money in the bank, maybe they wouldn't need to run these kind of NBC promotions? Maybe they wouldn't need to place advertisements in the new tab window?
> Amazon’s presentation said the average ad load per hour is expected to be between two and three-and-half minutes, which would be meaningfully smaller than traditional television and most other streaming services. Some commercials would appear before a program begins playing, while others would interrupt it.
I wouldn't mind so much if they were all preroll. I understand that they might interrupt a movie halfway through (because otherwise the preroll would be 6 minutes long), but I really hope they don't interrupt shows.
> The ad reductions will occur in news programming, late-night NBC and Bravo shows, reality programming, competition shows like America’s Got Talent and other cable originals.
The only reason they're doing this is they don't have enough buyers to fill the slots. Traditional media is great for brand advertising, but it's so hard to show ROI, I can see the wisdom to shifting budget to Facebook and Google.
1: https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/nbcuniversal-will-permanentl...
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