The good news for Cox customers: Disney’s ABC and ESPN programming will be available on-demand. The bad news: You won’t be permitted to fast forward through any advertisements. That’s one heck of a trade off and a good argument to record shows yourself using the DVR of your choice. The advertising model, of course, is designed to fight (the possible perception of) DVR ad-skipping and to find new revenue streams. According to the WSJ:
The amount of advertising incorporated into the on-demand offerings is still under negotiation, according to George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN and ABC Sports. Cox will likely get one 15-second commercial per episode to pitch its own products. The remainder of the spots will be a mix of national ads sold by the Disney-ABC Television Group and local ads sold by ABC’s affiliated stations.
And here I thought the future was product placement.
Or we can all just go get a torrenr and skip the bullsh*t all togather. Sorry but forcing an old world modle and trying to make it work by invading my home with DRM is not the way to win :p.
I just don’t see people giving up their FF and REW. While technology will allow companies to control that aspect for ON-Demand type distribution, I doubt they’ll be able to sweep it away from recording broadcasts.
Heck, you could even capture the on-demand program via a separate device, and watch it at a later time with quickskip, FF/REW, etc.
A broadcast-flag might prevent such capture, but a la DVD CSS, someone somewhere will hack it, or like HD DVD, some device will fail to keep its secrets.
FYI, if you want to you can find the story posted elsewhere without the WSJ subscription nag. Just google for the title.
Interesting story. Sounds like they are doing dynamic ad insertion into the content. I wonder if you can still fast-forward and rewind the rest of the show, just not fast-forward through the ads…
Obviously how acceptable this is to people is going to depend on how many ads there are.
p.s. They dismiss the issue in the article of whether this sort of disabling of ad skipping would ever be something a cable-supplied DVR would enforce, but in the wake of the NDVR loss by Cablevision, I can imagine it might be something the media companies end up demanding…