I figure they deserve it for making me watch anti-piracy ads on legally-viewed DVDs.
1: During football season, I'm a regular. Falls right between the late afternoon CBS football game and the late NBC game.
3: But the Steelers were off this week.
When I was engaged in my ride-every-single-route-on-the-NYC-subway project, I thought someone should produce a chart based on areas where you are more or less likely to see people walking through the cars with bootleg DVDs.
Oh come on, CBS, are you too cheap to spring for a single-page article view?
Did you finish, eb? I've done some lines all the way (1, 6, 7, A, C, F, J, N, S, Q, W), but those have just been accidental, and not usually in one ride the whole length.
6: The CBS thing is blocked in Canada? I'll sell it to you for 5 toonies and a healthcaresystem.
7: Yes, I think. I didn't really keep a record, but I've been to every terminus.
I did cut corners, in a way. I didn't usually ride one line the entire way each time; it was more a matter of filling in gaps. I also decided not to re-ride the lines that ran over the exact same tracks as a line I'd already done. In practice, that ended up happening a number of times as I wasn't very efficient and had to go back to some places when I didn't just hit every terminus in that direction on the same day. I wanted daylight for all the elevated sections, so I skipped those lines if it was getting dark, as it did often since I was there in winter. But I'm pretty sure I've been on a train that stopped at every single operating station, except possibly Roosevelt Island because I remember realizing at some point that I might not have gone through there. But I know I've ridden the rest of the F.
9: No, I mean the print article is viewable only in sections. If you select print, instead of putting it on one page, it triggers the printer screen.
I haven't tried watching the video. In about 30 years I'll be in the target audience.
I love the Roosevelt Island station. On the way to Queens, you go through the red-brick Lexington station, which makes me sing the regular Mario Bros. theme song to myself, and then Roosevelt Island switches to the underworld song (gray bricks, deep underground). Duduh duduh duduh. Duduh duduh duduh.
Looking at the map, I would have had to miss 21st Queensbridge too if I missed Roosevelt Island. Unless I was insane. I know I've gotten on the F at 63rd and Lexington, and I don't know why I'd have gone south from there, so I'm just going to say that I've been through both those stations.
12 is awesome and makes me want to go ride the F for fun.
Your head is wrong, Stanley.
Easy!
The J might have been my favorite, owing to the extensive above-ground section. Things like the Brooklyn end of the R, the Bronx end of the D, and the Queens endpoints of the E and the F were disappointing for being all underground.
(Also, did a comment disappear?)
2: It occurred to me that people can live quite well without movies and incessant news coverage of shitheads making $20 million per picture.
If the studio suits can't come up with a viable business model they can simply stop making them, and then those people can learn to serve fries with the burgers.
If the studio suits can't come up with a viable business model they can simply stop making them, and then those people can learn to serve fries with the burgers.
Argh. This is like expecting lighthouses to be funded by the free market; just not going to happen, and if you try it you end up with inefficiencies all over the show.
I would legally buy - well, not so much right now, but with more disposable income - more movies on disc if I could be sure there'd be some legal way to transfer and keep them as physical media/file formats change. I would buy digital copies if I got something like ownership rights to them.
But none of that is possible at any wide scale, so I rarely buy movies. I also don't obtain movies illegally. So I watch a lot of rentals or public domain films or stuff on tv (at least back when I had access to a DVR). I must be worth at least a couple hundred dollars to the film industry - why aren't they catering to my purchasing habits?
Atrios recently linked to this story about DVRs. I can't believe all those people are watching recorded commercials, but I guess they are.
Huh, never occurred to me to deliberately ride subways just to ride them. The only ones I've taken all the way, I think the 1/9 and G. I've come close on the A and the C. Queens: barely go there, other than JFK, Bronx: been to Riverdale twice in my life, that's it in a dozen years in NYC.
I guess eb is in more of a hurry to get through his TV shows than some people.
It still looks like just barely a minority who watch through the commercials on the DVR. At least in the 18-49 group.
On our Sky+ they have started this thing called 'Anytime' where each week they have 20-30 selected programmes that you can watch (anytime) or record instantaneously. Best thing about it - no adverts.
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What has happened over the weekend that my computer is now highlighting every search word on every page, if I googled a phrase? The word "The" is lit up, and that is irritating and over the top. How do I get rid of this?
|>
I figured out how to get rid of it. Ugh, what an annoying feature and waste of my time.
it is bleeding Hollywood to the tune of billions of dollars a year [...] piracy is costing Hollywood $6 billion a year at the box office
Argh. You can't just make up numbers. Downloading a movie that would cost you $10 to see at the theatre does not mean the studio is losing $10. Calculating the loss due to IP theft by adding up the retail value of the legal products people are copying is ridiculous. For context, the entire annual domestic theatre gross in the U.S. is about $9.5 billion. If all piracy was somehow shut down tomorrow, they wouldn't come close to making an extra $6 billion.
This is like expecting lighthouses to be funded by the free market; just not going to happen, and if you try it you end up with inefficiencies all over the show.
But movies aren't necessary for safety and efficient economic infrastructure. If the big studios went bankrupt, we'd just have to find other ways of entertaining ourselves, which might even be a good thing.
That DVR article is spectacular uninformative, unless you really care about Nielsen numbers. All it has to say about who watches DVRed commercials and why is this:
According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?
The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.
"It's still a passive activity," he said.
Well that was helpful. First, 18-49 is an enormous demographic. Are there differences between the under 30s and the over 30s? I would strongly expect so, but we don't know. Why is it still a passive activity? Are people surfing the internet during commercials instead of fast-forwarding (I do this quite a lot)? Are they making a cup of tea? Are they talking to each other? Or are they literally too lazy to push a button?
29.last: That was my question as well. Commercials are for bio breaks, getting the mail, bringing the laundry up to fold, etc. There is a whole rhythm. "It's back on!" is a common vocalization in our household. But then, we don't even own a DVR.
On the commercial thing: We don't even have a DVR, but I've used the one at my dad's. Observations:
Reasons to skip ads: ads suck, get through the show faster
Reasons not to skip: pure inertia, ads can be entertaining, skipping past the end of the break and then going back sucks
My take is that religiously skipping past is not worth it to a lot of people, not because they're too busy drooling, but because it's extra effort with a downside (vigilance and over-skipping). I suspect that most people don't think of TV-viewing as a task to finish as quickly as possible. And, frankly, ads can be entertaining (more so for people with bad taste/low standards) - I don't watch much TV, so I'm not super-sensitive to ads (IOW, I don't feel oversaturated, like if I see that one with the chickens one more time I'll explode), but it doesn't drive me crazy to see them some (although, in truth, I generally surf during commercial breaks). Point being, 2 minutes with the Free Credit Report singing guy, the Progressive chick, and some digitally-enhanced brand-building ad doesn't harm my life much (OTOH, ads focused on stereotypical gender roles make me pretty irritable).
Didn't the one DVR company have a "30 second skip" feature and the other one didn't, and the former company went out of business?
I download TV episodes now and then, but I also have a decent collection of TV series on DVD. There are some shows I like that just barely didn't get cancelled (Chuck, and I'll probably buy Dollhouse), so I figure I should support them - every little bit helps and all that. In other cases, I discovered the show after several seasons had already gone by, and once I had seen enough to tell that I liked it I went out and bought DVDs (Battlestar Galactica) rather than download the rest over a span of weeks. So file-sharing helps the company in that sense.
However, I can't believe piracy is such a big business. Bizarre: the video quality is so horrible, who would watch it?
I want to ignore whatever good points there might be about video piracy because the industry's spokesman in that 60 Minutes interview is so maliciously stupid.
"The chances of a movie, for instance, like 'The Matrix' being made shrinks. Here's a guy, here's a movie, two guys, they've made a small independent film. Warner Brothers gives them $75 million to make this script that nobody can understand, right?" Soderbergh said. "Wouldn't happen today."
re: 32
Isn't the point that they'd made the lesbian plumber movie, with Gina Gershon, and off the back of that Warner Bros gave them $75 to make the Matrix [which had the script, etc.]?
The 'small independent film' doesn't refer to The Matrix.
If I could see a movie in the theater for five dollars or less, I would go all the time. I *like* movie theaters. But the $10-$12 ticket is way too much, with the result that I have pretty much lost the movie-theater-going habit. If the ticket price were half as much, I would probably go at least three times more often...
Do they ever measure rating for commercials? At one extreme, almost everyone watches the Superbowl ads. Maybe during the rest of the year people wouldn't hate ads if they weren't yet another stupid truck commercial with a late 70s country/pop song.
The ad-skipping thing was interesting. The TiVo has it well-tuned such that hitting play when you're fast-forwarding jumps back a bit, so you seldom have to manually rewind to avoid missing bits. I've heard that other DVRs (cable/sat company provided ones) aren't as slick about that, so it's much more annoying. That would definitely make it less likely that we'd actually skip.
We watch a fair number of ads during live sports events, because we don't want to get too far behind. However, it is common for us to pause at the beginning of the commercials, do our bio break, get snacks, whatever, without worrying about whether the game has started again, and then skip ads until we get back to the game. If we're a little behind, that's fine, we can make it up during the next break.
Ad ratings: At least for the Super Bowl, TiVo-the-company does gather stats from the boxes to find out about their popularity. I'm sure they could for other things, but I don't know if they've convinced anybody to pay them for it.
My take is that religiously skipping past is not worth it to a lot of people, not because they're too busy drooling, but because it's extra effort with a downside (vigilance and over-skipping).
It's hardly much effort. Press button repeatedly until programme starts again. If you overshoot, press another button to go back 30 seconds. And you must be a lot more tolerant of ads than I am. It drove me nuts last time I was in the States trying to watch the news and having ad breaks every 8 minutes or so. Also, people who watch more TV have presumably seen the ads more often than you, and are more likely to be sick of them.
Didn't the one DVR company have a "30 second skip" feature and the other one didn't, and the former company went out of business?
I don't know about DVRs in the US, but I've got one which lets you set how far you want to skip forward or back with each press of the buttons. As far as I know, that sort of skip is standard in the UK, though maybe not always customisable.
But don't insult my intelligence and call it a small independent film, the appeal of which is rooted in ideas no one can understand.
To be fair to Soderbergh, he wasn't calling The Matrix a small independent film. He was saying the Wachowski Brothers had only made one small independent film (Bound) before The Matrix, so giving them that money was a gamble.
Also, people who watch more TV have presumably seen the ads more often than you, and are more likely to be sick of accustomed to them.
33: Ah. I'd never heard of that movie. Looks interesting.
What he's saying is still stupid (I know people talked and talked about pop philosophy themes in The Matrix, but it's still nowhere near a "script nobody can understand", at least not in any good sense of the phrase) but at least he wasn't completely fabricating the "small, independent" part. My mistake.
Re: ads, I watch a lot less TV than my roommates and I definitely get sick of ads more quickly than them. Maybe that's because they have their laptops with them, though, and I don't.
re: 490
Yeah, the script nobody can understand is the follow-up. And nobody can understand it because it's bollocks. The first one is quite a tight film, by contrast.
However, I can't believe piracy is such a big business. Bizarre: the video quality is so horrible, who would watch it?
They are conflating, AFAICT, several levels of piracy.
What is called "screeners," the camera in the theatre, is only a small part of even the downloads. There are the copies of the commercially released products available for download, for instance. The screeners might effect opening weekend or early box office.
But by far, I think, the biggest type of piracy is the illegal copy, the counterfeit mentioned in the article, mass-produced overseas (Asia, Mexico, for instance) with decent slipcases and covers.
I really have no idea. I don't know how many of the teenage torrent geeks will download, but go to a theater anyway, once or twice, or buy the commercial DVD on release. I don't know how many downloaders also pay via a cable route. I know the big sites, and I see that Star Trek, recent film, has been downloaded 450k times in two months. English-language site, so maybe that covers mostly Western Europe & North America. My max guess from that would be 2-3 million downloads worldwide. I guess that is a significant number, if I really understood what it meant. Star Trek still made a little profit.
I don't watch that much commercial TV, and I don't own a DVR. I do go run errands during some ads. Mostly, I watch TV over the internet and then I do tend to watch the ads. Hulu's had this watch a 2 minute 20 second infomercial about the nuva ring and watch your show ad free. I got up and left while that was running.
The various avenues of movie distribution are much better developed than music distribution. I don't know how much revenue is generated for studios by cable rights, which is my way of watching movies.
On-Demand can give me two-month old flicks for about $6, and hundreds to thousands of films over 2 years old and DoD for $1.99. The movie channels give me a mix of old & new , oh several hundred, live, DVR, On-Demand with my subscriptions. There are several channels I don't subscribe to, although I am trying to talk her into the foreign film channel, but not the Asian film or Spanish-language channel.
Dexter is available, all three seasons, right now. The Wire rotates thru the seasons, around 5 episodes at a time.
I can't make sense of it all, and I don't much care.
It's hardly much effort. Press button repeatedly until programme starts again. If you overshoot, press another button to go back 30 seconds.
Presumably there are people who don't hold the remote at all while watching TV. As the quoted exec notes, passivity in TV watching is a feature, not a bug.
If you had 2 channels, one that let you watch commercial-free in exchange for, I dunno, standing up and sitting down once every 10 minutes, and one that had regular ads, I'm pretty sure the latter would get more viewers (including among the young and spry), even though the former is pretty minimal effort.
I'm pretty damn lazy (example - I regularly wait longer for a bus than it would take me to walk), and even when I'm high as a kite I can still be arsed to pick up a remote sitting right beside me. There's passive and then there's being a in a persistent vegetative state.
in exchange for, I dunno, standing up and sitting down once every 10 minutes,
Remember when remote controls first appeared? It was common place to mock them because getting up and changing the channel is oh-so-hard. Ah, nostalgia. Now we all agree that it's hard to get up and change the channel. I don't even know where the button is on the TV, actually.
pick up a remote sitting right beside me
See, you know where the remote is. The only time I can find my remote is when it is sitting on top of the television set.
Didn't someone here tell a story about how their kid stole the remote, wrapped it up, and presented it as a Christmas present a few weeks later?
48: Do you remember remote controls that were attached by a thick wire to the TV?
I distinctly remember TVs with a cylinder that had the channel numbers on it, and a little plastic window through which you could see the number of the channel you were on. The remote was attached to the TV by a thick tube and had two buttons on it, channel up and channel down. When you pushed one, the cylinder turned with a heavy THUNK.
I've noticed that advertisers are getting smarter - when I zip through the commercials at 5X speed, some have logos that stay on the screen long enough to be recognisable.
When I'm watching something in the dark, however, I often don't zap, because the gawdawful remote that belongs to the DVR is hard to use when one can't see the buttons - the FF button is just below the "cease watching" button and I get tired of having to hit the DVR menu and restart whatever I was watching.
Back in the olden days, a friend of mine would tape The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Space Ghost, The Tick etc. on VHS, and then we'd watch all the shows late at night. Of course, we just had to manually FF/scan through the commercials, and invariably said friend would not hit "Play" quickly enough, and then the other people watching would always shout: "[Friend's name]! This time you've gone too far!"
Life was funnier then.
51: Aha! rob finally reveals himself to be a Russian spy. Nothing that clunky and inconvenient could ever have been produced by the combined genius of American and Japanese electronics conglomerates.
I don't even know where the button is on the TV, actually.
I'm pretty sure my TV doesn't have any buttons.
The first TV I remember in our house had a QuickStart toggle switch. Would you like your TV to turn on? Then use the QuickStart Feature! Would you like to stare at a gray screen for several minutes? Then disabling the QuickStart Feature is right for you!
Speaking of commercials, did anyone else (among the non-skippers) catch the Christmas diamond ad during the World Series last night? So very wrong. Just for that I'm not buying any diamonds this Christmas.
I do get pretty fed up with the same ads over and over during a long day of football. I was pretty grateful when Dodge couldn't afford them anymore last year.
If you have comcast cable you can implement a 30 sec skip:
http://www.whatheck.com/2008/02/comcast-30-second-skip-ahead-button.php
It is totally worth doing
56: WE"RE GLAD WE GOT TO HELP YOU HAVE YOUR TV TURN ON INSTANTLY, HEEBIE!
But movies aren't necessary for safety and efficient economic infrastructure. If the big studios went bankrupt, we'd just have to find other ways of entertaining ourselves, which might even be a good thing.
Doesn't have to be necessary for safety etc; this is actually a rather obvious (and surprisingly simple) application of public good theory when you get down to it.
Hey DE,
Any luck getting health insurance? I remember your COBRA was running out.
(Not obvious in a `idiots! why don't you see it!' way, but in a `oooh, now that is nice' way.)
I almost never watch the ads if I can use a DVR. There's a 10-15 second jump back button on many remotes. I just use that instead of the play button to stop the fast forward. Since it sets the recording to play after jumping back, it deals with overskipping just fine.
I've never had a DVR, but back in the day of VCR, it used to be a coveted skill in my family to be able to stop the tape at exactly the right moment. It became a competitive game to see who was the best, naturally.
You can program comcast's dvr for a 30 sec skip too:
http://www.whatheck.com/2008/02/comcast-30-second-skip-ahead-button.php
I forgot to mention that at one point when I was a kid we had a dual dial - uhf/vhf, or whatever it was - tv connected to a beta vcr with a long-corded "remote" control attached. And we were happy to get it. Or maybe this was when we'd moved on to cable on a box with, I think, a sliding tab for changing the channels (no remote).
67: We had a cable box and my dad ran a cable from wall to the cable box and back to the TV. He did this for grandma, so she didn't have to get up. For our house, dad used the 'MH, let's see what's on CBS' remote-control strategy.
TV and movies are a public bad.
I liked TVs better when they had the analog dials. I always lose the remote for literally years at a time, and you can turn the analog dials a lot faster than the buttons on the TV that advance one channel at a time.
69: Everybody stay off of Walt's lawn.
No, it's okay. All the grass on my lawn died when I couldn't figure out how to work the hose.
So what if studies lose money, go out of business, and stop making movies?
We already have WAY TOO MUCH entertainment availible. Same thing with the book publisher problem that was on pbs last night. I go into a book store and there are far more books that i ever could read before i die, even limiting things the the couple of genres i mostly read.
I get that people like art, like thinking of themselves as 'pro-art' or creative or whatever, but we have way too much of this shit around. It shouldn't be supported, either directly or indirectly through enforcement of IP or non-regulation of DRM. It should be sin-taxed heavily.
About the only exceptions seem like books on current events/politics (even though most of that really ends up being idiot stuff like PALIN or Moustache Freidman) or movies made with new special effects. But why the shit should so many people be making new romcoms or police procedurals or whatever, instead of doing something productive.