Thursday, May 17, 2012

A DVR Ad-Eraser Causes Tremors at TV Upfronts

NYT reporting:
Broadcast television executives came to New York this week, as they do every year, to talk up their new TV shows in front of advertisers.
This year, they are having to talk about yet another technology trying to tear them down.
The disruptive technology at hand is an ad eraser, embedded in new digital video recorders sold by Charles W. Ergen’s Dish Network, one of the nation’s top distributors of TV programming. Turn it on, and all the ads recorded on most prime-time network shows are automatically skipped, no channel-flipping or fast-forwarding necessary.
Some reviewers have already called the feature, named Auto Hop, a dream come true for consumers. But for broadcasters and advertisers, it is an attack on an entrenched television business model, and it must be strangled, lest it spread.
 ...The Auto Hop is noteworthy because it originated not from a start-up but from a satellite distributor with longstanding ties to the rest of the TV industry. Dish Network regularly negotiates with the networks for the rights to rebroadcast programming. Without that programming, subscribers would switch distributors. Yet Dish has still decided to promote its ad eraser, which comes with the Hopper, a new DVR that can record all the prime-time programming on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC simultaneously.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/business/media/dish-networks-hopper-cuts-ads-and-causes-tremors-at-tv-upfronts.html?ref=media

2 comments:

  1. Because most of the programming I record is on ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, I like how easy it is to skip commercials the day after they’re recorded using Auto Hop. The Auto Hop feature compliments Primetime Anytime and will save me a ton of time not fast forwarding through commercials. Because I work for Dish I can say that this awesome new feature doesn’t cost anything extra on your monthly bill of you have the Hopper.

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