DirecTV says it could deploy technology that would enable its millions of subscribers to automatically skip television advertising, Reuters reports. DirecTV probably wouldn't do anything until lawsuits pitting Dish Network against TV broadcasters, over the legality of such practices, are settled in court.
Fox, CBS and NBCUniversal separately have sued Dish Network over its new AutoHop service, which allows consumers to skip television ads. At the same time, Dish has filed its own lawsuit against all four broadcast networks seeking a declaration as to the legality of its new service.
Dish’s "Hopper" is a digital video recorder that allows Dish customers to automatically skip past all the commercials on some prime-time network TV shows. Understandably, the TV networks aren't too happy about that, even if Dish customers might like the feature, and they have sued Dish Network to stop the practice.
TiVo also had earlier proposed allowing its customers to skip over all commercials, but TiVo disabled the feature after intense opposition from programming networks.
In a sense, Dish is gambling that the "surgical" approach, allowing users to skip virtually all commercials on broadcast network prime-time programs, will please customers more than it irritates the few affected networks.
Hopper would have faced across the board opposition had it proposed eliminating all commercials from all programming, automatically.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
DirecTV Might Deploy Ad-Skipping Technology
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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1 comment:
Do the networks actually believe people just sit there, complacently watching the commercials on their pre-recorded shows? I seriously doubt it. I fast forward through every commercial I can, which is just about all of them since I started working evenings and have to record basically everything I want to see. So when Auto Hop was introduced, I was happier than ever that a coworker at Dish had talked me into getting a Hopper. I can’t tell you how much it’s cut down on the number of times I smash the Skip Forward button every day, which has probably saved me from some kind of repetitive stress injury.
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