TiVo Causes Increase in Product Placement

ndansmith writes "Wired has got an article on how TiVo and other 'ad-skipping technologies' have caused an upsurge in product placements on network television shows. The 84% increase in product placements on TV over the last year has drawn protests from both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. An example from the article: 'In a recent episode of the NBC series Medium, writers had to work the movie Memoirs of a Geisha into the dialogue three times because of a deal the network made with Sony earlier in the season. They even had the characters go on a date to an early screening of the movie and bump into friends who had just viewed Geisha to tell them how good it was.' Readers may also remember a controversial Cisco Systems product placement on Fox's 24."

And the winner is...

Shake's 12 minute commercial [tvsquad.com] for Boost Mobile! [boostmobile.com]

OK, so they were taking a shot at product placement in TV shows, but still, damn. I hope everyone at Williams Street got some free phones.

Re:And the winner is...

I like the Axe commercial with the hot girl bathing someone "ooh, you're a dirty boy, how old are you?" "22" "Ooh, yes you are"

I laughed so hard the first time I saw that. I don't think I would commercial skip because I am afraid I will miss some of the better forms of comedy on television (reference the CITI identity theft service commercial series). Then again, I could skip the personal injury lawyer commercials and their darn jingles.

Re:Quite frankly,

This might not be their biggest problem (TiVO). Networks seem to have tapped into this mentality that tries the patience of its viewers every step of the way. It's not just the commercials any more. Now it's having to endure visual clutter like the station ID logo, and these rediculous sliders that zip in and out at the bottom of the screen just after we've already been subject to four or more commercials.

I've found this so annoying in fact, that I've started to look at alternative forms of distraction. Podcasts have grown to fill that niche. They're great- they are personal, it's easy to connect with the producers, and they are/can be eductional and/or informative. Best of all, there are few if any commercials, and NO ANNOYING LOGOS OR SLIDERS. That's gets my vote hands down.

Re:Quite frankly,

When I lived in the USA (British native for reference), I found your TV unbearable. Adverts popped up at random timings and without any kind of warning. Here in the UK, you can actually plan aroud the commercial breaks - it's a half-hour program, you get a few minutes after quarter of an hour. Just right to nip to the loo or make some tea.

I'm hoping that it doesn't spread like trailers on DVDs is starting to. I bought a DVD recently and up came trailers for other DVDs the company marketing people thought I might like. Will definitely be keeping an eye out for which company releases the next film I might be tempted to buy. Same applies to the two-minute piracy warning - I paid for the DVD. I am NOT their target audience.

Re:Quite frankly,

I'm hoping that it doesn't spread like trailers on DVDs is starting to. I bought a DVD recently and up came trailers for other DVDs the company marketing people thought I might like. Will definitely be keeping an eye out for which company releases the next film I might be tempted to buy. Same applies to the two-minute piracy warning - I paid for the DVD. I am NOT their target audience.

That pisses me off, too. I think it's part of a secret plot to make pirated dvds actually more attractive (ignoring the price) than the real thing. I'm not sure how the movie industry expects to profit from this though.

Re:Quite frankly,

Yeah, product placement really galls me. After a long day at work, I come home and just want to unwind with a sitcom and a cold Budweiser, king of beers. But then I'm subjected to a bunch of product placement. I swear, it's enough to make me need an Advil, which is recommended by four out of five doctors. So instead of watching a sitcom, I go for a long ride in my Lexus, with its roomy interior, six-way adjustable seating, and powerful V6 engine.

Where's the value added?

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

Last season I started to watch the Shield on FX, after having watched the previous season on my computer by bittorrenting the episodes a day or two after they were released, and I found that the downloaded episodes made for a 1000% better TV-watching experience. No sliders, no moving graphics in the bottom of the screen, no station ID logos, and higher quality than my analog TV.

Someone should clue the local TV stations into a phrase: "value added." They have none. Right now they exist only because they have a monopoly on content (at least at the level of effort that most non-technical users are willing to expend). But as that monopoly breaks down and viewers start to get flooded with content from other places, they're going to be in real trouble.

I still watch a few TV shows, mostly as a social thing with friends, but if it weren't for the fact that we just enjoy getting together once a week and ordering pizza, I'd probably just cancel everything but my basic cable subscription and watch tv shows when they hit NetFlix.

Re:Quite frankly,

Now it's having to endure visual clutter like the station ID logo, and these rediculous sliders that zip in and out at the bottom of the screen just after we've already been subject to four or more commercials.

I predict that within the next year we'll see stations running a constant advertising crawler. They'l probably shrink the size of the actual content area and fill the margins with advertising, much like CNN does with its stock ticker, weather, etc. Ha! Try to skip that! I further predict that within another year this practice will be commonplace and used on the majority of channels.

In fact, this may drive wide-screen format for shooting new shows. The shows will be shot in 16:9 and broadcast full-screen, with the ads taking up the remaining space. And no, those of you with wide-format TVs won't be able to just crop out the ads. Some shows will be broadcast with the content at the top of the screen and ads at the bottom. Some will have the content at the bottom and ads at the top. Some will have content in the middle and ads both top and bottom. And some will even flip the ad and content panes mid-show. If you want to see the shows ad-free you'll have to buy the DVDs. (Or, of course, download pirated copies that have already been cropped.)

Re:And the winner is...

i think the ratio of truly funny commercials to complete crap ones is pretty low. wouldn't you rather be watching the actual programming that had you watching that channel in the first place?

it's kinda like, yea, once in a while you might see something entertaining while sitting in traffic, but do you really wanna sit in traffic all day long just so you can catch those rare moments?

Good or Bad?

While there are obvious disadvantages to this (such as crappier, cheesier scripts), couldn't this be a good thing? I mean, wouldn't you guys like it if commercials were cut down signifigantly? I know that I would.

Re:Good or Bad?

I mean, wouldn't you guys like it if commercials were cut down signifigantly?

Not at the price of hurting the actual show. I can buy DVDs and not worry about commercials, or just go get food during commercial breaks. Product placement doesn't give you those options.

Re:Good or Bad?

I would -never- watch Lost live on TV for one simple reason - commercials. Lost is such a film-like script, the commercials would totally ruin the feel. We missed the first season and rented it on DVD via Netflix (a godsend for tv series!), and watched the whole thing nearly straight through. After getting the 5.1 dolby digital and the full cinematic effect unbroken by tampon and maxi pad commercials, there's no way I'd ever watch a show like that on TV again. I just bought my wife a 140 hour TiVo for Christmas which will arrive this week- I'd consider watching a show like Lost on the TiVo if the commercial skipping worked out. I'd watch comedies and other less immersive television on live TV, but I think for me the days of watching commercials are generally over.

If they start putting placements in the show to the point it's like the Truman Show, they'll lose much of the (large amount of) money I spend yearly when DVD release time comes out.

Unfortunately, it's not like they can edit that crap back out before the DVD release without affecting the show even more.

Placements are a lose lose. If you're paying for the DVD, you shouldn't have to pay for the commercials. Perhaps TiVo needs to kick back a little money to the networks somehow. I know I'd pay an extra couple bucks a month if it meant no ads for me. Especially if networks implemented something that signaled to the TiVo "ok, here's where the ads start.... here's where they end" so when you play the show back, it was completely ad-free, it would not only save space, but would be a nice perk for the customers.

Re:Good or Bad?

Not to mention that placements bias networks toward shows on which placements are possible. Be kind of hard, for example, to to place a Pepsi or Apple product on a show like Firefly. (Though it might be worthwhile starting a Blue Sun corporation. Hmmm.....)

Re:Good or Bad?

In my humble opinion, there's bad product placement (see I Robot) but there's also good product placement as well (see Blade Runner). I hate it when advertisers force writers to write their product in the script then portrey it as part of the story, but I don't mind at all having a writer think "OK we have a futuristic setting where I want ads here" and then cutting a deal with the corperations for product placement there.

Even having a car in there where it doesn't matter which car it is, I don't mind them giving the car to the highest bidder, but having the actors say "nothing drives like a Ford!" while they're driving it makes me cringe. Basically as long as it's at the writers convenience it's good, but when it's at the advertisers convenience it's bad.

Re:Good or Bad?

I thought the product placement in Minority Report was extremely well done. It was kind of in-your-face, but it needed to be. It actually advanced the plot. I think avoiding product placement and using obviously fake brands would have detracted from the movie. "John Anderton, you look like you could use a Duff Lite!" doesn't have the same feel to it.

You couldn't get away with this in many movies, but once in a while it works.

Re:Good or Bad?

I don't get it. How could turning the whole show into a commercial be considered cutting down on commercials?

Good AND bad.

Good - Victorias Secret product placement.

Bad - Hemorroid cream product placement.

Re:Good AND bad.

Worse - It's the same commercial

Re:Good AND bad.

There's nothing wrong with correctly placing hemorrhoid products.

I've heard it's quite relieving.

Re:Good AND bad.

Bill Engvall had a thing about that - I ate this whole tube of preperation H and I still got them hem'roids. My mouth's so small I can't even eat a peanut. But I can whistle real good.

OK probably badly paraphrased, but it's funny when he says it

Re:Good or Bad?

Something I forgot to mention, was that PVRs really aren't broadly accepted, so TiVo seems to be a bit of a red herring. I don't see a 10% installed base of PVRs (if it is that, I think last I heard, it was 6-8%) as sufficient justification of inserting ads as part of the shows themselves.

I will say I'm setting up a Myth system in part because of the ads, there are way too many and way too lame. Using tapes is getting annoying.

Re:Good or Bad?

Besides the cheesier scripts, how is a television show which takes place in a post-atomic wasteland of the 22nd century supposed to work in product placement?

"In the future all restaurants are Taco Bell"

Re:Good or Bad?

Quite a lot even. It's sort of a running joke in Norway that "60 minutes" is allocated a 50-minute program slot by us, because it's an /american/ hour -- which apparently consists of 10 minutes more comercials than we get. (the 50 minutes by us also includes comercials, I'm guessing the actual program itself is maybe 40 minutes)

Nothing for you to see here...

hehe. First thing I thought of after reading the blurb...

Nothing for you to see here. BROUGHT TO YOU BY CISCO SWITCHES AND NETWORKING APPLIANCES! Please move along.

Artistic integrity?

From the article:

"some writers are putting up a fight, demanding more pay in exchange for scripting product plugs into their shows ."

So, in other words, it isn't like they are concerned about becoming shills...only that they aren't paid enough to be whores.

Porn

Wait till the porn industry starts using product placment, it will soon filter down to mainstream media in a more popular way!

<i>"After giving head nothing gets the taste out of my mouth better then mentos, my mouth is fresh and im ready to do the double penetration shot"</i>

Re:Artistic integrity?

So, in other words, it isn't like they are concerned about becoming shills...only that they aren't paid enough to be whores.

As much as everyone likes to bash the writers, it doesn't strike me as that outrageous.

When the network starts collecting money so that the people who write the scripts will say certain things, the writers have to work harder to do their episodes and still meet the networks obligations.

And if the writing is sucky because they were busy working in product placement, they're the ones who get fired; not the guy who got the comission for landing the deal.

I must be soul-sucking enough to write the dreck that is on TV, knowing your bosses are making more money so you can be forced to write even more dreck with product-placement would be too much.

They're effectively now writing ad-copy as well as scripts.

Inevitable

I suppose it was inevitable really... they'll always find a way to get to us. Here's hoping we never get quite as bad as depicted in "The Truman Show" though. I almost crapped my pants when I watched "I, Robot" and "The Island" and saw all the stuff they were pushing along with the film.

It seems kind of pathetic to do that.

Maybe it's time for television to evolve into something else. How much cheaper is our current cable television due to advertisements? How much would it cost if we stripped the ads out of the shows and just paid more for cable access?

Re:It seems kind of pathetic to do that.

You don't seem to have a very good grasp on how this system works. The money that you pay each month to the cable company goes to the cable company in return for offering the service—not to the stations. The stations, meanwhile, make (nearly) all their money on advertising. Thus the amount of ads has nothing to do with your cable bill.

Solutions

Those familiar with my anti-copyright ideas know that I've promoted product placement as a partial solution to PVR commercial skipping.

The advertising community is, yet again, far behind. Tivo is so 2001. BitTorrent and the newer anonymous P2P apps take the problem a step farther.

With vidgeeks easily editing out commercials for P2P redistribution (this can be time consuming to be frame perfect), it is only a matter of time before they digitally smear out product placement. A little bit of work and you can nuke logos without the MTV blur.

What will advertisers do next?

My thought is that we'll see video and audio starting and stopping at different offsets. Imagine -- a scene ends with the audio ending but the video continuing. A character can walk off screen for entire seconds after they're finished talking. If Cisco paid to have the audio portion of the ad start before the video is over. P2P editors could nuke this audio.

The video could end before the audio, maybe bringing a logo in before a narration is finished. Still, the video portion could be edited to black.

Pop-up video advertising could be placed like A&E and Bravo do with TB show mentions. In fact, I believe we see more of these mentions to prep us for 3rd party pop-overs. Yet a vidgeek could humorously edit the pop-over to advertise their l33t skills.

So what is the answer?

DRM.

Real Solution

The real solution is so simple, it may be beyond the grasp of marketers: make advertisements worth watching.

It's simple. Why do I skip commercials? They're annoying, loud, repetitive, gaudy, mindless. I don't want to watch them, and the producer believes I won't be watching them (I wonder why?), so they scream and shout to get my attention.

So make a commercial that's funny, witty, beautiful. And don't play it every commercial break. Make something I want to see again, and instead of skipping it, I'll take advantage of the TiVo and watch it again.

Such a thing is possible: such commercials already exist. They've few and far between, but we've probably all seen at least one or two. It's possible. If the existing ad agencies can't come up with them, find new ones. I bet there are a thousand independent filmmakers out there who could come up with 30 second clips that fit this bill on half the budget they usually spend.

This is the real solution, one that doesn't involve literally forcing us to watch with DRM and legislation. Which is going to alienate people? Making something they desire, or making it illegal to avoid something they don't?

Re:Real Solution

The real solution is so simple, it may be beyond the grasp of marketers: make advertisements worth watching.

You're approaching this from the wrong direction: making advertisements worth watching is an action to be undertaken by the advertisers and their customers. This presumes they are the people with the problem. They aren't; they're making plenty of money already; PVRs and other changes in the market are crimping their ability to make more money, but they're doing fine as it is. Being greedy isn't a "problem" for the greedy individual but rather a never-ending series of opportunities to make more money at your expense. Your comment assumes that finding one way to solidify or increase the revenue stream is sufficient but in fact the media companies are satisfied only when they exhaust all possible such schemes. So in fact the viewer is the one with the problem; without a PVR you have to watch more ads today than ever before, and even with a PVR you get less content than ever before. Either way, you're going to get more product placement as well, because even if the advertisers made "advertisements worth watching" and no one ever edited them out, you can bet that to sustain their revenue growth the advertising agencies and media companies will continue to increase the number of impressions they can sell per 30 minutes of airtime; having more effective advertisements just allows them to charge more, which is great, but they aren't getting their money's worth until every possible second of airtime is sold somehow to someone. The content is the worm, the ads are the hook, and you are the fish. No fisherman cares how good the worm is as long as it covers the hook well enough to tempt the fish. Fish seem willing to overlook a giant, flaming-orange hook so long as it contains the tiniest fragment of long-dead worm or worm substitute, and TV viewers, who live longer than fish and seem to develop a tolerance to "hooks", are no different. The media companies know this and that, as a fish, er, viewer, sucks.

So there are actually two solutions, one which is realistic and one which is not. The unrealistic solution calls for a contract made between viewers and content producers for a certain amount of ad-free content in exchange for a certain amount of money - the way cable TV was originally set up, in fact. This is unrealistic because, as happened with cable TV, the media companies, never satisfied with merely making a tidy profit, realised that you'll pay just as much for TV with ads as without, so they can actually make money both ways. So much for that. We're left with the REAL SOLUTION that actually works and is guaranteed not to require watching any kind of TV ad, ever, and as a side bonus penalises the greedy bastards who are forcing the issue: DON'T WATCH TELEVISION AT ALL. There's no law (yet) requiring you to consume what the media companies produce. The worm fragments are small, not especially tasty nor healthy, and in virtually all cases unattainable without being hooked anyway. You'll find after a few weeks of altered evening routine that you don't even miss them, and you'll do a boon for your own mind, the economy, and our civilisation's collective future just by not doing something. Why wait? You can solve your problem right now, without any help from anyone, and all you have to do is not do something that seems to be causing you a lot of grief anyway. It's easy, it's free, and it takes no time at all. What better solution could you seek?

Re:Real Solution

The real solution is so simple, it may be beyond the grasp of marketers: make advertisements worth watching.

That is exactly what they are doing; merging the advertisements with content you want to watch.

Product placements, chain letters, press releases feigning to be news, innocuous logos in video steadily becoming larger, /. stories submitted for profit; did you notice all the places usually void of advertisement that google's viral marketing tactics for gmail invites inveigled their way into? Welcome to the future. The marketers are not missing anything; they are 3 steps ahead of us.

Gone with the product placement

"Frankly Scarlet I don't give a damn... But get some nike air masters and I just might".

As I sit here reading slashdot...

As I sit here, drinking a DITE COKE [dietcoke.com], reading slashdot... I'm asking myself, why don't I have a TIVO [tivo.com] And if I did have one, which network would I choose to record... HBO [hbo.com]? Hmmm.........

Re:As I sit here reading slashdot...

Benjamin: Wayne! Listen, we need to have a talk about Vanderhoff.
          The fact is he's the sponsor and you signed a contract
          guaranteeing him certain concessions, one of them being
          a spot on the show.
Wayne [holding a Pizza Hut box]: Well that's where I see things just
          a little differently. Contract or no, I will not bow to
          any sponsor.
Benjamin: I'm sorry you feel that way, but basically it's the nature
          of the beast.
Wayne [holding a bag of Doritos]: Maybe I'm wrong on this one, but
          for me, the beast doesn't include selling out. Garth, you
          know what I'm talking about, right?
Garth [wearing head-to-toe Reebok wardrobe]: It's like people only do
          these things because they can get paid. And that's just
          really sad.
Wayne: I can't talk about it anymore; it's giving me a headache.
Garth [Dumps two Nuprin pills into Wayne's hand]: Here, take two of these!
Wayne: Ah, Nuprin. Little. Yellow. Different.
Benjamin: Look, you can stay here in the big leagues and play by the
          rules, or you can go back to the farm club in Aurora. It's
          your choice.
Wayne: [holding a can of Pepsi] Yes, and it's the choice of a new generation.

Doesn't really matter

It's nice to see the revenue battle not taking the form of buying congressmen for once. It's a battle between those who don't view commercials (which means less money for advertising slots), and the need for the television company to make money. The latest move is to include product-placement. If it works, great. If it doesn't, then those tv shows will be doomed (or they'll stop doing it). It is an interesting battle, as it shows the problem of having entertainment for free. I think the internet sidesteps this issue as the cost is much lower, so more people creating the content are willing to be out of pocket. Unfortunately with tv, this just isn't an option because of the large budgets.

It could mean the death of tv as we know it. Although I believe that if it does mean the death of tv, tv shows will continue to live in DVD releases (as the audience directly pays for the product and has been successful).

The reruns are going to be even worse.

20 years from now the re-runs are going to look really weird. If they started doing this 20 years ago we'd probably be watching Scooby Doo episodes where Shaggy mentions how comfortable his Dead 70s Brand bell bottoms are. Then again, with modern technology they might start editing old tv shows inserting new scenes to do product placement or just dubbing over them with new brand names.

In show ads? Whatever.

I'm tired of the networks complaining about loss of ad revenue due to fast forwarding through their ads. I've had a TiVo for going on 5 years now and I have to say that I watch more ads now than I did before.

Seriously, I don't watch that much TV but what I do watch, I watch multiple times, usually because I'm multitasking doing something else (like posting to /.) and not paying too much attention; the TV is just on in the background and I glance up now and then to view it.

When the comemercial break comes on though, I'll grab the remote and fast forward through the ads. Since TiVo doesn't auto-skip, I watch the whole commercial break, albiet at quadruple speed. I'll even stop it on ads that grab my interest. Once the show comes back on, I resume playback and go back to whatever I was doing.

So really, some company that airs ads in shows that I watch are getting more than their money's worth.

Re:In show ads? Whatever.

Since TiVo doesn't auto-skip, I watch the whole commercial break, albiet at quadruple speed.

While playing something, hit select - play - select - 3 - 0 - select on the remote to enable 30 second skip. Now that button opposite the 8 second rewind skips 30 seconds instantly. It's much easier (and requires almost no concentration, unlike 60x ffw) to skip commercials that way. You can just mash it 4 or 5 times right into the break (ok, 4 or 500 if you're on a Turner network) and if you land in a commercial, hit it again. Fine tune with some 8s-back.

As a bonus, you know whenever your Tivo upgrades because you have to turn it on again.

how, exactly,...

...did a couple going to an advanced screening of the film manage to bump into their friends who had already seen it?

this is my third time reading about it, and i just noticed that.

Cisco's products on "24" were part of the story

I didn't mind Cisco's ads on last season's 24. I would rather see the characters using real products like Cisco's IP Phones [cisco.com] than some propmaster's incorrect vision of what an IP phone should look like. Ford also sponsors the show and they drive big Ford trucks. Toyota sponsored the DVD preview of Season 5 and you see Jack driving a Toyota. Last season on Smallville, Clark used the red Old Spice deodorant - it was in his locker and on the big banner over the football field.

Product placement is only bad when it's inappropriate and doesn't flow with the show. I sure wouldn't want to see Jack Bauer and Chloe O'Brien discussing Kotex Tampons [kotex.com] or Vagisil cream [vagisil.com] as he's about to waste some terrorists. Or President Palmer plugging Uncle Ben's rice [unclebens.com] at a press conference. But if they are looking for a USB flash card containing Top Secret information, I don't mind them mentioning SanDisk [sandisk.com].

Pay per re-run?

With a regular television show the commercials are inserted by the local affiliate as the show is being broadcast. In this way the commercials can be localized for the viewing audience. So, if you watch a five year old television show the commercials are current and not frozen in time from five years back. Now the 'commercials' are a fixed part of the content, and it will not be possible to extract them later.

But, this begs me to wonder... Advertisers pay for each time a commercial is run. With this new model will they find themselves having to pay a small fee every time a show is aired as a re-run?

-Chris

Product placement is not so bad most of the time

A few years ago, I decided to specifically watch for product placement, so I tend to notice it enough to make note of it. In general, I keep an eye out for shots that contain an identifying product logo when the logo adds nothing to the story. Some placement, like the Mc Donalds placement in The Fifth Element, are blatant and hard to miss. In I Robot, Wil Smith's "retro" possesions (shoes, music player), arent so subtle. The intrusive ads in Minority Report are odd, they are blatant, but the mechanism for the advertisement is relevant to the plot. Others are easier to miss; Jackie Chan movies seem to feature a Pepsi logo of some sort more often then not.

Even good product placement is not too hard to spot if you look for it. In general, if manage to notice that one person has, for example, a Nokia phone, then its a safe bet that every other phone will be the same brand. The car driven by the principle character is a favorite target for product placement. Soft drinks are most often one or the other.

24 Usually handles product placement pretty decently, but I concede that they do a suprising amount of it. The placement for Cisco was perhaps the most blatant, but not quite jarring enough for me to make too much of it. 24 Product placement tends to encompass the following products (that I have noticed),

Computers: Alot of CTU equipment is Dell. Season 4 had a few Alienware laptops as well.
Cell Phones: I think Jack uses a Nokia phone.
Cars: A great deal of Ford SUV's. It appears that Season 5 may use Toyota placements, based on the teaser from the Season 4 box set.

I consider bad product placement to be any sort of product placement where the product in question becomes the focus of the camera instead of the story at hand. 24 Usually does ok, the Cisco placement aside. They do alot of it, but its done as tastefully enough that it does not annoy me.

END COMMUNICATION

END COMMUNICATION

Arrested Development pokes fun at this

Apparently Fox asked Arrested Development to try to get some of their sponsor's products in the show. Arrested Development, as usual, takes a humorous take on it.

Carl Weathers: [about Burger King] I'm going to go get a drink refill. You know you can get unlimited refills on any drink you want?
Tobias Fünke: It's a great restaurant.
Narrator (Ron Howard): It sure is!

In the episode "Motherboy XXX", Barry Zuckerkorn (played by Henry Winkler) says, "I missed breakfast, so I'm on my way to Burger King" and then jumps over the dead shark on the pier. This is, of course, a reference to Henry Winkler's character in "Happy Days" (1974) jumping over a shark while on water-skis, signaling the moment when that show lost its relevance. The phrase "Jumping The Shark" was made popular in the 1990's as a metaphor for a television show reaches its peak. --Amazon.com season 2 quotes page

Bizarre logic

OK, so the problem is that adverts have become so intrusive in programming that the audience will spend hundreds of dollars on a device to avoid them. And their solution is "add more adverts which reduce the quality of the shows which attract our audience"? What a great bit of creative thinking.

I don't know how anyone watches US TV, anyway. I find the less than 10 minutes an hour of adverts on commercial channels here (UK) annoying enough and from the constant "fade-to-black and recap a little" you see in US programmes like Lost or ER, TV in the US is adverts with the odd show crammed in between them.

Don't forget: YOU'RE the product, not the ads!

Television's primary product for sale is not the junk featured in ads, it's YOUR eyeballs. Where do networks get their primary source of revenue? From selling your eyeballs upstream to corporations. The TV shows are just crummy hooks to get your eyeballs for a little while. Is there some level of art, acting, or writing involved? Sure, a little. But the VAST majority of TV programming is happy, blinky stuff to keep you hooked for just a few more minutes.

I admit that I like plugging in for a little brain-nap myself, but don't forget there ARE other forms of entertainment. I mean, let's not elevate the so-called art of television to some level that we think they're above blatent product placement.

Star Trek

Next thing you know I am going to start seeing editted episode of Star Trek: TNG.

Worf: Captain, message coming in over *obvious dubbing moment* AT&T.
Picard: Patch it through.
*AT&T logo appears on view screen before person starts talking*

I think that will be when things hit the ultimate low. Well either that, or when they start putting product placement in shows where they should not be.

Solution?

Run the commercials less often, maybe only once per half hour. Run fewer total commercials. But don't server everybody the SAME commercials. Make part of the "deal" for getting the PVR be that you will be asked to fill out a questionaire. You can leave it blank, or lie, but you will then be served irrelavant commercials. You will still get 2 min per half hour no matter what you answer, so you might as well answer honestly. You can skip them if you want, so it's up to the commercial writers to make sure you don't WANT to skip them. It actually INCREASES the number of ads the station can sell while DECREASING the ad time each individual gets. And since they can give real stats on the number of people they are reaching with each ad, they can vary the price of the ad accordingly. Almost like "pay per click" on the web. Add some interactivity to the ad so 1) people will bother to watch and interact with it, 2) you get some real stats as to whether they DID watch and interact with it.... The technology is all there. Use it. A TiVo is a PC! Even the crappy Explorer 8000 that the cable companies give away is a PC or sorts.