
Cable companies have started showing fewer ads because of Netflix - rajathagasthya
http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-companies-cut-ads-because-of-netflix-2015-11?IR=T
======
clentaminator
Aside from ads, freedom of choice with respect to just what you watch seem to
be the other key motivator.

With the capability of streaming and on-demand services, why would any
consumer put up with having to choose any channel with a fixed programming
schedule? I almost certainly don't want to watch what you're trying to sell.

No other industry seems to operate in this manner. When it comes to books,
games, music, etc, consumers choose specific products. With cable TV you don't
get that granularity of choice. Netflix just brings the traditional TV model
into alignment with seemingly everything else.

Anecdotally, cable prices seem to rise but the new channels that are sold to
me as a benefit are the exact opposite of what I watch. More sports channels?
Despite me having never tuned into a single one? If you're going to profile
me, at least make an effort to do it well.

~~~
benten10
2 points. I won't speak for myself, but from what I've gathered from friends:

1\. A lot of people seem to like video ads. Movie ads specially tell you
'whats hot', and general ads put you 'in the loop' so to speak. I've tried to
install ABV for a couple of people who won't let me because they actually like
ads (as in youtube, not the shiny bright popups). This may be true for more
people than HN crowd would assume.

2\. One of the biggest problems I have with non-cable is that I need to think.
When I'm with friends, we spend a very considerable amount of time trying to
agree on what we want to watch, and often end up watching some stupid cute cat
video because we couldn't decide. TV solves that. Perhaps if cable were
referred to as 'a curated platform of best video content, being streaming
24/7', the conception would change?

~~~
sosuke
Number 2 is true and very frustrating. I'd like to have a Netflix channel
option. Sci-fi channel, horror channel etc. Did you ever call up someone else
and tell them to turn to a channel then share in the same experience?

~~~
jonlucc
One issue with this will be that so much media seems to be moving to very
compelling stories, and you don't want to miss any. You used to be able to
tune into the middle of a show without really missing anything.

------
jackgavigan
It astounds me how much US TV airtime is devoted to adverts - roughly 18
minutes out of every hour, AFAIK (plus any split-screen advertising
shenanigans).

In the UK, (outside the BBC, which doesn't have adverts) TV broadcasters are
limited to an overall average of 7 minutes per hour, with limits of 12 minutes
for any individual clock hour (which drops to 8 minutes during primetime).

The BBC's Natural History unit deliberately inserts ten minutes of
"disposable" content that can be cut from the program when it is broadcast on
commercial channels (e.g. the 'Yellowstone People' segments that were included
at the end of episodes of 'Yellowstone' when it was broadcast on the BBC, but
are dropped when it's broadcast on commercial channels).

~~~
darkr
I also find it astounding that people pay $50-60/month for a cable service
that is 30% adverts.

At that ratio, the cable service should be paying them.

~~~
Yhippa
Same thing for the mobile web. Since I pay for data usage I am more concerned
about things like video pop-up ads or even little things like web devs failing
to download an ad image appropriate for the size of my screen instead of the
original resolution image.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Completely agree.

------
hwstar
This is why I dumped cable in 2008.

"Hour long" American TV shows are some of the shortest in the world, and are
filled with redundancy as viewers "forget" where they are in the show after a
stack of ads every 6-8 minutes. This degrades the quality of the programming
to the point it is not worth watching.

PBS programs are 50+ minutes long, and BBC are 58-59 minutes long. The local
PBS station has been showing short ads in the last 10 minute segment of the
hour. That's acceptable and much better than interrupting the programming.

In the future Broadcasters will not need transmitters, and Cable TV won't
exist. All programming will be delivered over the Internet. Instead of tuning
to channel 10 on your TV, your TV connects to the channel 10 website and you
can choose what you want to watch. If you pay extra, you can see shows without
ads.

------
sageabilly
Even among my less technologically advanced friends and family there's maybe
only a handful of people who still watch shows regularly on cable television.
My in-laws watch TV shows but they record them and skip over the ads. Pretty
much the only thing that I know of that anyone watches on cable and still sits
through ads is live sports.

Watching cable networks flail around and completely fail to understand that
their business model is not relevant anymore is always hilarious. Now that
Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have really good original programming there's even
less of an incentive to have cable.

~~~
chrisseaton
But don't the cable companies own Hulu? So they have realised the change is
coming, and have already adapted.

~~~
thefreeman
Except Hulu (at least used to, it may have changed recently) still shows ads
to their premium subscribers, which is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

~~~
dragontamer
It changed. There's an ad-free option on Hulu now.

~~~
ma2rten
Hulu just started offering an ad-free option recently.

~~~
vitd
Note the asterisk, though. Apparently a few shows are contractually obligated
to include ads on Hulu, even with the "commercial-free" option.

------
nlawalker
A question for those who have done more thinking on this than I have:

I see cable TV going the way of the dedicated phone line - a bundled benefit
you get for a very small fee on top of the primary benefit, which will be the
internet connection. The overall cost of a subscription will remain roughly
the same, but the cost will be allocated to the internet connection: much like
mobile carriers are now basically free voice+text across the board and the
cost of the plan is based solely on the data tier you want, what I see
happening in the future is that both cable TV and home phone are going to be
small add-ons to your $90-$120/month internet bill. In many markets there is
virtually no competition present to prevent this, and in those where there is,
collusion seems to be a foregone conclusion.

This seems inevitable to me given the rise in cord-cutters and, as a recent
headline pointed out, the "cord-nevers". Is this what's going to happen?

~~~
macNchz
I have Time Warner internet-only service in NYC and they are constantly trying
to sell me cable as a $10/month addon to my $35 50mbit internet package. I
imagine it's a pretty limited set of channels, but they're very much already
using that sales tactic.

~~~
gtk40
Same thing with Charter for me. They constantly try to sell me a $7/month
addon that will give access to over-the-air channels through cable. I got that
with a >$10 HD antenna, so I'm not sure what the value would be. (and I've
barely used that...)

~~~
rrego
I've been trying to (unsuccessfully) research why OTA broadcasts of channels
exist in the first place. Why do/would these networks provide their service
for free? I thought transmissions were to be encrypted.

Am I missing something?

~~~
stonogo
Ads.

~~~
greyfox
from what i understand OTA channels are free because the public airwaves are a
public utility and they are funded by the ads they sell. cable just took this
model and decided to reverse the costs from the ad generators to the
consumers.

------
lentil_soup
“Consumers are being trained there are places they can go to avoid ads.”

With that kind of rhetoric no wonder they're still in denial.

~~~
lsaferite
Yeah, that comment also jumped out at me as well. I really cannot fathom their
thought processes.

------
edc117
Wait until some of you start getting the 300gb data caps Comcast is trying to
force down people's throats. They are gracefully allowing me to have my old
un-metered service back for 30$ more a month.

300gb hasn't been a reasonable number for years now, and with more people
leaving cable, this is clearly an attempt to monetize cord cutters further.
Disgusting company.

------
jimmar
I can count on one hand the number of times my children have sat down and
watched network TV. They are 4 and 7 years old. With ~15 minutes of
commercials per hour, I've probably saved them from watching thousands of
commercials, which I think is a good thing.

~~~
eitally
Mine only ever see it in hotel rooms on vacation. The first time they
experienced it, my son got very upset because we could pause it when he had to
use the bathroom. The commercials irritated my wife & I so much we just turned
it off entirely.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
My wife and I watch Netflix when we do watch anything (we have twin two year
olds, so this is a rare luxury). For some reason or other we turned on
'regular' tv the other day and there was an NFL game on. We could not believe
how many commercials there were! Also, just how insultingly unintelligent they
were. I mean, who actually would want to watch these commercials!?

~~~
ahlatimer
As a football fan, the quantity of commercials is something else. CBS is
particularly bad. You'll often see a touchdown, PAT, commercial break, cut
back to the kickoff with the ball in mid-air which results in a touchback (so
like 5 seconds worth of "content" which is really just a ball flying through
the air and a guy catching it and kneeling down) followed by another round of
commercials. It's insane.

When I get particularly frustrated with it, I pause the game and go do
something else for a good 15-20 minutes, then come back so I can at least fast
forward through some of them.

------
LeonM
My roommate called me recently that the TV was not working at home, because
his girlfriend wanted to watch TV.

As it turned out, we never plugged the cable into the TV, we have lived in the
same house for 3 years and neither of us ever watched cable TV during that
time. (we do have a cable subscription because where we live you can't get
cable internet without the TV and radio part attached...)

I never understood why someone would pay a ridiculous amount of money
(compared to say netflix) for a cable subscription and still think it's OK to
be watching to ads for 25% of the time...

It's time for cable companies to accept the truth: their technology and
business model is old fashioned (a free harddisk record to "pause" TV is a
solution to a problem that should not exist!).

~~~
coldpie
My girlfriend and I lived in our house for two years without even hooking up
the roof antenna. Eventually I bothered to do it (not trivial, long story)
because my girlfriend wanted to watch football. The idea of _paying_ for
network TV with ads is hilarious.

------
jakozaur
15:38 per hour of showtime + 2 minute of re-runs in some programs. Netflix got
zero, just enjoy your movie.

Looks like cable companies are still in denial phase. How about ad-free
versions of their channels?

~~~
raverbashing
> How about ad-free versions of their channels?

Apparently that was what cable was all about at the beginning

It's hard to lure back people to an inferior product.

~~~
draugadrotten
The ad-free historiy of cable also tells you the future of Netflix and other
streaming services. Bait...and switch!

~~~
ssharp
When I had Hulu Plus, it was actually worse than cable because it forced you
to sit through commercials. If I recorded the show on cable, I could fast
forward through them at least.

~~~
Itaxpica
Hulu Plus recently added an option where you can pay a bit extra (like two
bucks a month) to make it ad free. It makes it a way more pleasant experience.

~~~
surge
Only on certain shows, Hulu is still owned by networks that don't "get it".

~~~
jerf
Yes, but it's a short list. At the moment. Considering that the first
derivative is at least for the moment away from ads, I am cautiously
optimistic. I'm hoping that once Hulu has the data on the people paying those
$2/month that it will reveal that there's a statistically-significant
relationship between those shows still having ads, and the $2/month customers
watching less of them per capita.

(My wife recently wanted us back on Hulu for Seinfeld, and it was a big factor
in our decision to go back that we could turn off the ads, except in a set of
shows we don't much care about.)

My understanding of the economics is that $2/month is _significantly_ more
than they can hope to make in ads off me, so I'm hoping the money is enough to
overcome any residual desire to advertise. (Once the ad addiction is broken,
there's good reason to believe it'll stay broken. Nowadays it's easier to get
people to just _give_ you a buck rather than shave away pennies at a time
through ads. Thirty years ago that wasn't true.)

------
larrik
Even beyond airtime, the stupid ads and logos blotting out the screen during a
show is becoming inexcusable. Sometimes those things can take up a third of
the screen!

~~~
sizzzzlerz
And I noticed the other day that the Discovery channel logo is now animated.
Its bad enough that it squats in the corner like a dog taking a shit, now your
eyes are drawn to it because its moving. Fucking bastards!

------
NiftyFifty
I've been off cable (television as a service) for close to two years now. The
space where TV exists for value, is our local programming and news. The
national relevance is almost moot from a television source, considering I read
online news more here and Leister Holtz on NBC. The net savings basically was
1/2 the Time Warner bill -> $105 -> $56. That's almost $2500 in the last two
years. That's a refactor of savings into something like a boiler upgrade, or
solar panels to portions of the house to extend the savings even further.
Either way ... small bill, big savings.

------
jupiter90000
As much as I dislike cable due to all the advertising, I eventually signed up
because I wanted to catch some NFL games (was just doing streaming Amazon,
Netflix, etc for quite a while prior, with no NFL). I initially got an HD
antenna, but reception was spotty where I live and some local channels
wouldn't even come in. The amount of advertising on cable is really annoying,
but it is a shame that it seems somehow very difficult or impossible to
actually stream a live NFL game without having a cable or satellite package of
some kind. Following online 'gamecasts' that don't actually show the video of
the players on the field just isn't the same.

This is frustrating because it seems the NFL and television network providers
have effectively made games impossible to watch live unless you go through the
'funnel' they want you to go through to watch it. Due to this, I've felt much
less freedom of choice to select from what source I choose to obtain live NFL
games, in comparison to movies, TV shows, etc, which I can generally end up
finding on a streaming service of some kind to buy from.

A plus that I had forgotten about, is the on-demand stuff with a cable
package, which is similar to the other streaming services I'm used to (usually
no ads, or maybe one at the start of streaming), except it's nice to not have
to pay for a season of a show (like I might on Amazon) if the station the show
is on was paid for as part of the cable package.

------
unoti
Netflix has sponsored all this cutting edge research on recommendation
engines, and it can predict very well how much I'm going to enjoy something.
Why in the world won't it just show me a list of 4 and 5 star things? Are they
afraid I'll just watch those things over the course of a month then stop
subscribing?

The clunkiness of their UI isn't incompetence, it's by choice, right? Or am I
missing some important part of their UI that's hiding in plain sight
somewhere?

~~~
MiddleEndian
As someone who prefers movies to series, their recommendations were fantastic
for their DVD plan. Their streaming selection is much more limited (I found
that maybe 10% of the movies I wanted to see were available) so they have to
mask it.

(I have no idea if their delivery service recommendations are still good
because they decided my address was fake when I moved and cancelled my
account)

------
ucaetano
The article makes a confusion between cable companies (Comcast, TWC, Charter,
etc.) and TV/content networks (Time Warner, FOX, Viacom, etc.).

------
cletus
Here's another explanation: every year the TV audience gets older [1].
Advertisers notoriously chase the coveted 18-49 demographic. Younger viewers
are increasingly not watching traditional TV.

So, you can view Time Warner's move to cut ads in prime time as simply a way
of raising prices by reducing supply (inventory).

As for cable companies shoving TV packages down customers throats, well that's
easy to explain. The bargaining power a cable company has with media companies
is directly proportional to how many TV subscribers they have. So every
Internet-only customer a cable company has marginally raises the per-customer
cost of TV.

This is also why Comcast wanted to merge with Time Warner. It's simply about
reducing TV costs.

This business model really has to die.

[1]:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/tv-
is-increasingly-for-old-people/)

~~~
gorner
Time Warner Inc. (the company discussed in OP's article that owns HBO, CNN
etc.) has been a separate company from Time Warner Cable since 2009.

TWC is the one that Comcast tried to buy (and is now trying to merge with
Charter).

------
_RPM
It's absurd that one can pay for premium cable TV, and still must be forced to
listen and watch advertisements. I refuse to watch cable TV advertisements.
HBO is the only network I can stand to watch now. I have the most basic cable
package because my Internet came with it, and it also came with HBO. I get so
annoyed by advertisements on TV.

------
cJ0th
I wonder whether netflix et al will introduce ads once cable is dead and the
VoD market is saturated. After all, they too want to increase their profit at
any point in time.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
As long as Netflix can appease investors by attracting new membership, they
won't need ads. Once membership peaks they will have to start thinking of ways
to keep their QER in the black (because investors can only see one single
quarter into the future). That's when we have to worry.

------
NiftyFifty
Second thought is the add revenue in YouTube and how Google is slowly making
it impossible to view something without an intro ad to a video spot I want to
watch. Sanity on product reviews, or modifications might actually drive me
away from YouTube and stick to reading. I use the MVPS.org hosts file to ad-
block most of the website content I review, as I pipe it into /etc/hosts and
c:\%windows%\system32\drives\etc\hosts files to keep myself from the flash ->
ad-virus injection methods for security reasons. However, YT is driving me
crazy with 30s ad spots for like a 3 minute video and you can't walk around
them no matter how you try unless you browser jack or regional change some
things (right?). Anyway .... venting on Google's ad pushes myself.

------
S_A_P
Now if the DVD vendors(hopefully a dying market) could only get the picture
that when I rent a movie for my kid to play in the car, I dont want to have to
skip 30 minutes of ads to start what I rented...

------
guelo
> cable channels have actually sped up re-runs to get two minutes more of
> advertising per show.

Wow. It's like a reverse TiVo, fast forward through the content to show more
ads.

~~~
sholnay
Yep!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6i1VVikRu0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6i1VVikRu0)

------
Taylor_OD
I'll be honest that a major reason I stopped watching cable. I use to freak
out because of the frequency of ads. Intro to the show? Followed by an ad. I
understand the length of ads but constantly interrupting the show is what
upset me much more. I'd rather watch 7 minutes of ads at once then 7 1 minute
ad segments.

Now I never worry about it because of Netflix. If only I could get rid of Ads
for podcasts.

------
dba7dba
The REASON cable TV caught on initially decades ago was the promise of cutting
out ads. There were NO ads on Cable TV initially.

~~~
silveira
And the lesson is that eventually there will be ads on Netflix too.

~~~
dba7dba
I actually think they will eventually.

It may be in the form of forcing you to watch preview like you are forced to
with DVDs

Or they may decide to raise monthly fee by $2 a month but you won't have to
pay if you elect to allow ads.

It will happen. Share holders will eventually demand it when their growth
slows down.

------
izzydata
Why anyone younger than 50 still pays for cable is a mystery to me. Once the
fiber internet infrastructure across the US becomes the norm it makes more
sense for all shows and services to be provided over the net even if they keep
a similar nonstop 24/7 airing format. You just wouldn't be downloading while
it is turned off.

------
qjighap
So if they are showing less commercials how are they planning to lengthen
programming to fill the 30/60 minute time slots? I understand new content can
be altered, but re-editing old content would be most difficult.

------
silveira
Too little, too late.

------
zeckalpha
Supply and demand -> They can charge more for less.

------
surge
Too late, I'm already done with cable.

