All that DVR, commercial skipping is coming home to roost. It could not last.
I know, the programming sucks; but there are always a few shows we watch; sans commercials. It’s a business model set to fail.
> It’s a business model set to fail.
And there you have it. This despite the FCC having just forced all over-the-air broadcasters to upgrade their equipment for digital TV at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per station.
There’s a lesson in here somewhere about government meddling in private enterprise...
I disagree. They just have to get their commercials in where you can’t skip them, aka product placement. Recently I’ve noticed a lot of car related stuff (driver talking to passenger while using new automatic parking function with auto logo on steering wheel plainly visible and some comment from the characters about how cool it is).
I suspect in the future the specific product won’t be hard coded in. Showing that “cool new feature” isn’t going to benefit the auto maker ten years from now during a rerun. What they will probably do is encode in the video stream “there is a drink can here, with label facing this way” and then have a computer render in the details during broadcast. That way they can sell advertising to the highest bidder every time they show the program. They could even show different products based on location, where regional products might be shown in their local markets.
Then again, maybe they’ll all go the SciFi channel route and make their programming so bloody stupid that people will skip the shows and only watch commercials.