Paying for Commercials…

[PGage]

Puck News columnists Matt Belloni (covers Hollywood) and William Cohan (Wall Street) posted a conversation they had about the likely success of Disney and Netflix opening up an ad supported tier. Cohan wrote: “My take is that introducing ads will cost Disney and Netflix more in the long run in terms of prestige and consumer annoyance.” My heart is with Cohan, and maybe my head too, especially his point that there is a big difference between tolerating ads for free, and paying $8/month to have to watch them. I can see a lot of people who were thinking of canceling Netflix to save money downsizing to ad-support (to save $7/month), but how many people who were not already on Netflix will want to pay to watch commercials? Netflix thinks they will get more than 50 million new subscribers by 2025. I will take the under. https://puck.news/netflixs-u-turn-the-next-cnn-purge/?sharer=23728 [This is supposed to be a free guest link, but not sure if it will work for more than one person)

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[Bob Jersey]

I got a gate, asking for an email for a free account (limited reads) or a 7-day free trial.     B

PGage, Sept 5th:

[PGage]

Sorry about that…

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[Bob Jersey]

Not a problem, I took the free account.     B

PGage, to moi, Sept 5th:

Sorry about that…

[Adam Bowie]

I've not had a great deal of experience with ad-supported services since I tend to have workarounds for all the major ones in the UK. For example, I use my Sky box to "download" ITV Hub shows rather than stream them - allowing me to fastforward ad-breaks as it's old technology on a hard drive!

All that is to say that I still empathise with the comments of David Pierce from The Verge about seeing the same ads over and over - especially on ad-funded streaming services: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/5/23338364/streaming-service-ads-repetition

I've definitely noticed this the occasional time I've watched something on, say, Amazon's Freevee. And they're not even as well targeted as seemingly Pierce's ads are in the piece.

Even high repetition on YouTube ads were driving me mad until I upgraded my YouTube Music subscription a couple of pounds to get ad-free YouTube (best two pounds a month I spend - assuming you already use them for music streaming).

Adam

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[Dave Sikula]

I enjoy Puck, even if some of the Hollywood coverage succumbs to the Industry mindset that there's nothing in the universe more important than the movie business and its associated egos. (The KCRW podcast, "The Business," is especially egregious in this regard.)

My biggest takeaway from the article is the speculation that, eventually, Viacom/Universal might merge with Discovery+/Warners. I can't imagine a functional Justice Department would allow it, but it sounds about the only way the latter could dig itself out of its self-inflicted debt.

--Dave Sikula

[Bob Jersey]

So they think Paramount and Comcast will be one before taking on WBD? Woof.

(I bailed out on the piece; too over-my-head in stock terminology.)     B

Dave Sikula, Sept 6th: