Foxtel stole my time!
p2pnet news view TV | Advertising:- In January I suggested P2P pushback was no doubt partially caused by an over-abundance of adverts on Australian cable TV.
To illustrate this I analysed “Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles” series, currently running on Foxtel.
The first episode I examined had 22 ads.
The second had 21, and this week’s had 23.
So I thought I’d break it down so even network executives, the public and, possibly, even judges awarding damages in law suits about copying movies, could understand how ridiculous some of these damages awards have been in recent content infringement cases where the content is purely for personal consumption and not for resale at a market stall.
The Episode I discuss was aired in Australia on Foxtel Channel 108 at 8:30 pm 17th Apr 2009
Series 2, Episode 6. ‘The Tower is Tall, but the fall is short’.
The program had 23 ads, including community service advertisements, in three groups of multiples with the addition of a lone straggler, the Nissan advertisement at minute 19, which was obviously the premium advert of the program preceded by the voice-over leader ‘Don’t go away, your show will be back in thirty seconds.’
Advertising Table for the Terminator.
Armed with this information, we can now review the actual valuation of the show’s actual content based on a monthly subscription to Foxtel.
The left hand column assumes a subscription without the IQ PVR (A TIVO wannabe) and the right column, with.
*Means that you can record two programs at once – doubling the programming hours capable of being time shifted to 1440 hours.
We can see the actual content value is either three or four cents.
Foxtel stole $1.50 cents of my leisure minutes
In 1984, the US judicial system ruled in the Sony Betamax case that time shifting for personal use wasn’t illegal. Foxtel is using that judgement to distribute PVR’s to its consumers.
There hasn’t yet been a test case on Foxtel stealing time from subscribers via their advertising – which has meant increased revenues and extraordinary profits to Foxtel, and has apparently not resulted in a drop in viewer subscriptions.
In the instance of this episode, Foxtel stole $1.50 cents of my leisure minutes. So I have a number of choices. I can invoice them for my time but unfortunately, the proven cost of issuing an invoice is around $25.00, leaving me with a net negative balance of $23.50 for every hour of Foxtel content.
I can start keeping book on their advertising, but that would require an administrative overhead equal to approximately five minutes per hour of television that I analyzed and entered in the advertising record book.
Assuming I could be bothered to do all of that, (and my anger at Foxtel’s abuse of the original contract between me and them is getting close to taking me to that extreme), I’m sure Foxtel, who couldn’t afford to lose a precedent-setting case of this proportion, would throw everything and the kitchen sink at my legal team on the basis that sooner or later, they’d bankrupt my prosecution.
The original contract with Foxtel didn’t allow for commercial advertising. In fact originally Foxtel marketing was exclusively based on the promise that it did not have any advertising included, which naturally lead to the premise that the reason for taking a Foxtel Subscription was that more of your time could be spent ‘quality’ content” than if you aired Free to air channels.
Foxtel hasn’t offered a discount for stealing 15 minutes of my life for every 57 minutes of their programming (which 15 minutes constitutes revenue generating advertising), and;
Said advertising is in direct contradiction to my original agreement for the subscription purchase of the Foxtel cable service (ie, no advertisements). And it’s unreasonable of Foxtel to require me to remove the adverts they’ve inserted illegally, which reduces considerably my Hedonic value of the Foxtel experience, which could be ameliated by the analogue time shifting and videoredo extinction of the advertising content, at an approximate time cost to me of 10 minutes of my time.
I now proffer a thesis that as long as viewers are paying a subscription service for the content, there is very little difference between:
Time shifting Method A
Recording it onto an IQ box, outputting it to an external device via various methods – but lets say – analogue + TV-Capture card and cleaning out the adverts via VideoRedo and then watching the resulting content.
Or
Time shifting Method B
Clicking Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles – 2×07 – Brothers Of Nablus.avi, providing you’re connected via an ED2K service.
Happy downloading Aussies. May your Hedonic Economic enjoyment of Terminator be forever at its highest possible level.
Eventually, with everyone downloading the program, and no-one watching cable – the ratings will convince the advertising agencies that Foxtel is a losing proposition and they will focus their attention elsewhere, and Foxtel will hopefully return to its subscription based revenue model, with only a few community based advertisements and hopefully interesting infomercials.
Sorry Nissan. But call me. Perhaps we can discuss where you should advertise.
Tom Koltai – p2pnet
[Koltai is an economist in Sydney Australia. He's says he's been online for 26 years, has run several ISPs and, "lobbied governments in four countries to prevent Internet restrictive usage legislation from being enacted". He says he's a strong believer in P2P, "as being a technological requirement to fully exploit the convergence of telephony with computers and remove the last barriers to human communication and interaction".]
April, 2009
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April 21st, 2009 at 2:53 pm
LOL Excellent!
+10
April 21st, 2009 at 3:01 pm
i hate commercials.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Dude. A few things awry with this little rant.
1. If you have an IQ, it means you can skip the ads. So why don’t you?
2. You don’t make the distinction between ads and promos (that being spots which get you to watch other shows on Foxtel). Generally speaking, people don’t mind these as much.
3. The studios make shows which go for approx 23 mins and 42 mins. That’s to allow for advertising. If you really wanted no ads at all, you’re either asking Foxtel to show wall to wall promos (not practical), to start at weird-ass hours (also not practical) or to include more 5-10 min buffer programs at the end (which they often do).
But I think the most important thing is the first. Ads are just a necesary evil – deal with it and skip them using the IQ like everyone else.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:05 pm
@Seriously:
A major point in Tom’s post was that advertising was NOT part of the original contract for the service he was talking about. Therefore, by inserting ads, the amount of paid programming time was reduced to about 3/4, though the payments remained the same.
And, since the channel’s promotional spots don’t bring in revenue, you can be sure most of that remaining 1/4 is 90% sponsored advertising, so I don’t see your point in distinguishing between the two.
So, in effect, Tom is saying they’re “stealing” programming time from the paying customer AND getting ad revenue on top of the customers’ payments, which were supposed to be for ad-free services.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:10 am
So we see that Foxtel the only cable provider in Australia and therefore a monopoly – well ok there is Optus.. but they have Same service ie: duopoly of One – has not only breached contracts by providing advertising to subscribers who specifically purchased the service without advertising, we also have the concept that Foxtel state and others believe (@Seriously) that to “remove” the advertising you need to PAY for another service “IQ” that was not part of the initial contractual arrangement in the first place..
Has anyone else thought that this could be construed as “Third Line Forcing”? [For those not in Australia it is a major offense under our Trade Practices Act]
But Foxtel/Telstra would never do that would they? *ha*
May 4th, 2009 at 4:16 am
Act with your wallet, and cancel your Foxtel subscription! Oh gee, you can’t because you want to watch shows like the Terminator that are so crappy they don’t make it to FTA TV. Ask the program makers why they only make shows 42 minutes long and not 60 minutes. So that the ads can be placed. I agree with you entirely, way too many ads, but when I started to pay for Foxtel (I stole it for a LONG time) it already had ads, so I guess my contract doesn’t offer ad free viewing, so I guess I can’t join you in a class action.
FTA TV is spreading the FREEVIEW gospel at the moment. Hang on, five new channels? I have had them for ages, except for ONE HD which broadcasts sports 24 hours a day, and means 10 no longer has a high def channel for anything other than sport. And the programming on the other “new” channels is 95 percent the same as the SD channel. Funnily enough, the ads are pretty much the same too.
The problem we have is a small market, high costs to provide the service over such a wide brown land to relatively few people, and a monopoly on service providers. If only Foxtel would listen to me and do it my way, they would make a motza.
Give foxtel to everyone for free, charge them for the box and install, and give everyone for free the channels NOBODY watches, come on who watches the weather channel? I can think of at least 15 channels nobody watches. Use those channels to advertise their other channels, the ones you have to pay for, keep drumming it in to the masses, and eventually they will weaken, adding a channel here and a channel there, the old customers who now pay for foxtel will still pay to get all the channels, and foxtel will have a much larger userbase to flog not only their pay to view channels, but also everything else known to man that advertisers want to sell.