The end of commercial skipping as we know it is near. You knew this was coming when Hulu became popular despite its few, but un-skippable ads. You knew it was coming when the Time Warner Cable Start Over service began making the rounds with the on-demand fast-forward function disabled. You knew it was around the corner when the MPAA started making a fuss about Selective Output Control (SOC) to block DVR recording on early-release HD movies. Sadly, you pretty much knew it was inevitable from the first blissful moment you used a DVR.
Yesterday, at a TV Everywhere breakfast event hosted by Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable, CEO Quincy Smith of CBS Interactive mentioned the bugaboo of ad skipping in a throw-away comment at the end of the session. While most of the discussion centered on how to get TV Everywhere deployed, there was also some talk about why content owners and distributors should work to make it happen. There are lots of reasons, and everyone sees that the TV paradigm is shifting. But there’s also the convenient side benefit that making content available over IP also makes it a lot easier to block commercial skipping. In fact, if the advertising industry could figure a better way to quantify online TV advertising, we’d probably have an awful lot more premium TV content on the Internet today. There’s a lot of money to recoup from the fragmenting of audiences and decreasing TV ad spends.
In short, while TV Everywhere is going to be great for all of us – expanded availability of content we’ve already paid for – it’s not going to come without some consumer disadvantages in the long run. Such is the way of the TV revolution, and the capitalist market.