Comment Why this suit has legs to stand on... (Score 0) 578
Fox (and friends) makes money on TV shows in two ways: You buy their channel on [insert TV provider here]. Otherwise, they make money from advertisers. If they have a show that has 1 million viewers, the ads that are played during and around that show are worth 1 million possible ad views. That's worth some money, and Fox (and friends) will extract the value of good programming in this manner from the advertisers.
So there is a reason why Fox (and friends) are not interested in you skipping their commercials. If the box automatically skips the commercials, the advertisers can claim that there were no ad-view from that viewer, effectively lowering the overall value of the ads on the show.
Let's say that Fox (and Friends) win. No big deal, we have to press a button to skip commercials, just like we have done for years.
Now let's say Dish wins. One or many of the following may occur:
a) Fox (and friends) start to insert their advertisements directly into their shows. They already do this, in a limited fashion. Imagine much more invasive ads.
b) Dish (and their competitors) starts to skip commercials on a ALL channels, all the time. (The current version only hops adds automatically the next day, you can't do that the day of.) This leads to...
c) Advertisers reduce the amount of money they give to the channels. Because of the decreased revenue...
d) Fox (and friends) start to charge more for upfront for their channels and/or...
e) Fox (and friends) start making cheaper to produce content.
Is that what will happen? Maybe. Is that what we want? Maybe not.
--Pathway
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Disclaimer: I am a long-time customer of Dish Networks. I do not currently own the Hopper, but I have followed its' release. I am an advocate of IPTV, and I feel that Dish currently provides the best IPTV solution with their Sling purchase. I do not watch the TV show "Fox & Friends." The repetitive use of the term was intended as a joke. Laugh, it's funny. Especially since you have read this far.