outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials

[Capmaster]

Unfortunately an unintended consequence is that the consumer himself may be breaking the law by bypassing the commercials

They can add it to my tab ...the one that gets a new entry every time I bypass CSS by backing up a DVD

[Laddydaddy]

Capmaster wrote;

They can add it to my tab ...the one that gets a new entry every time I bypass CSS by backing up a DVD

That was great. Thanks for the laugh. We'll have to compare tabs sometime. Maybe someday I'll see your smiling face on a post office wall.

[BJ_M]

i hate to tell you what is next and comming ...


ads DURING the movie - on dvd ...

yes -- some movies will have ads .. also some will have ads linked to on-line content if you play the movie back on a computer ...

[Laddydaddy]

BJ_M wrote;

hate to tell you what is next and comming ...


ads DURING the movie - on dvd ...

.

That doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the day will come when the movie you see in the theater has commercial breaks just like the TV shows.

[BJ_M]

there are already ads during the movie in theater ...

every single brand you see on screen is an ad , bought and paid for .... sometimes for millions of $$


but when put on dvd - what is funny, is that sometimes these brands change or are edited or masked .... because they didnt pay for both movie and dvd rights .... same for broadcast rights ...

[ViRaL1]

Looks like the MPAA just can't stop coming up with ways to ENCOURAGE piracy.

[Capmaster]

Capmaster wrote;

They can add it to my tab ...the one that gets a new entry every time I bypass CSS by backing up a DVD

That was great. Thanks for the laugh. We'll have to compare tabs sometime. Maybe someday I'll see your smiling face on a post office wall.

My picture will be right next to yours on the wall

(I joke about it now, but some day ...who knows )

[SilverBlade]

They shouldn't even try to make these laws anymore. There is always someone who can get around it. I remember when Discreet released 3D studio Max and said no one in a million years could break the code. It was broken with 24 hours. They shouldn't try, it will encourage people to pirate movies or to come up with software to remove ads within movies. They are shooting themselves in the foot.

But I'm a Canadian, American laws don't affect me

[BobK]

I just wonder how many people that posted to this thread have taken enough time to write their senator or congressman to make their complain there?

Everybody likes to complain- most of them don't do anything else.

[handyguy]

I just put the dvd in way before I want to watch it so when Im ready, there is the menu screen.

[glockjs]

man if so many companys didnt make so many crappy products they wouldnt have to shove it down our throats....there's a freakin idea for the decades, less money on ads more money on the actual product

[Nilfennasion]

Or maybe, just maybe, they could try getting off their cans and making some ads that people would actually want to watch. With ads like that "whazzup?" Budweiser commercial that was parodied so well in Scary Movie, people may not buy the product in the end, but you can rest assured they remember the ad. It seems to me that producers of commercials these days are just lazy and unrealistic.

[BobK]

> With ads like that "whazzup?" Budweiser commercial that was parodied so well in Scary Movie, people may not buy the product in the end, but you can rest assured they remember the ad.

I suspect that very few people here know anything about running a business or selling a product (other than having a garage sale to get rid of junk they don't even want).

Businesses run ads to sell things. Having people remember an ad is almost worthless if people don't buy the product. It's not necessarily entirely worthless if it really creates some brandname or product recognization- Coca Cola has spent decades doing that, but the desired result is still selling more of the product.

Given a million dollar ad budget, do you think any intelligent business man would rather:

a- create an ad that gets great reviews, is parodied on SNL and that everyone remembers, and increases sales by 5 %

or

b- nobody remembers but it increases sales by 50%

If you pick A then I would suggest you keep your job and never try going into business.

[BJ_M]

everyone remembered the taco bell dog, but thier sales slumped big time during the time the ads were run ...

by 20%

[vcdforme]

aw big deal.
you can already get everything in China, for 1/10th the
price, AND they take out the commercials for free.
I love China. All you need is a pen pal.

[Nilfennasion]

The market is oversaturated with ordinary, average ads. Even the ads for local businesses in regional areas, which are so bad they're good, do nothing to increase sales simply because people have been overexposed to them. If you think fifty percent increase in business from an ad that nobody remembers is a realistic expectation, then quite honestly, I don't want to use an ad or business you are responsible for.

Anti-ad sentiment is very high here. On one channel, they even cut off TV shows earlier than normal in order to insert more ads. In the case of shows like The Simpsons, they often wind up fading out some of the best punchlines. As a result, that hostility gets transferred to the businesses advertised during those extended breaks. There goes that fifty percent you were hoping for.

It's like eMpTyV and the RIAA. They think bombarding us with crap and giving us no option to change the channel will make us buy. Meanwhile, independent record labels such as Moonfog, who bring people something innovative and out of the ordinary, have seen their business rise as much as a thousand percent as a direct result of the Internet. Who's kidding who?

[painkiller]

And yet, the vid broadcasters push ads during their own programs in order to remind you of future programs......

So - it would be likely that theater events will soon do the same thing.


All the more reason not to go anymore.

[BJ_M]

aw big deal.
you can already get everything in China, for 1/10th the
price, AND they take out the commercials for free.
I love China. All you need is a pen pal.

1. the usa reads a large number of mail going to
foreign countries now .. thats how this guy got popped ... http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/11/19/sex.tourism.ap/index.html

thats right -- if you mail it outside the states, it has a good chance of being read ......


2. in china , a vast majority of Internet shops are closed and the ones that are open are closely monitored ... ALL the video and film material we send to china and receive from china is now checked without exception (we do a lot of business in china)

3,. films and dvds imported INTO the usa now have to carry a form describing their contents and no pornographic material deemed unsuitable (by who?) ... it is spot checked at this time ...



yes -- all of the above is true and not in some movie ....

[ViRaL1]

That's the job I want. I want to be the Uber Usher at the movie theater who charges you the extra $3 at the door if you're coming in after the commercials / previews.

I'd do that job only if they allowed me to be armed

I know Kung Fu.

3,. films and dvds imported INTO the usa now have to carry a form describing their contents and no pornographic material deemed unsuitable (by who?) ... it is spot checked at this time ...



yes -- all of the above is true and not in some movie ....

Why bother sending physical disks. If you have a decent opertation I'd think you could afford to upload the data and burn it here.

[BJ_M]

it is hard to send film through the internet, the sprockets keep getting stuck in the routers -- or 1000's of disks ... not sure what you are saying ...

we ship film into the usa and out of the usa (studios in both canada and usa) ....

[ViRaL1]

Well, not so much film, but DVDs.

[BJ_M]

not very practical .... but thanks ...

[BobK]

> If you think fifty percent increase in business from an ad that nobody remembers is a realistic expectation, then quite honestly, I don't want to use an ad or business you are responsible for.

I didn't say anything about what I would expect. That was merely a question to which you (intentionally) avoided addressing the point.

Much like the rest of your post avoids addressing any points or showing any real knowledge of marketing and how (or why) it works.

[Nilfennasion]

Your question is a fallacy. No boring ad will raise revenue to that extent. It's like saying advertising on a program that really offends your audience will raise revenue. Companies pulled their ads from Wonderland by the truckload because potential customers said that if they continued to advertise on that show, they could expect a lot of business to go elsewhere. Ads that do not give the viewer a good feeling about the product simply do not sell, period.

Another major fallacy businesses commit is that they attribute all their changes in revenue to advertising. I rarely buy anything because I saw it in an ad. Ads are so full of crap nowadays that I would dispute what an advert told me was the colour of the sky. I thought I had already explained this as a direct answer to your question, but apparently it's only an answer when you hear what you want to hear.

So allow me to reiterate. Businesses do not gain business solely from ads. In fact, many companies are reporting losses in business that can be attributed to their advertising. Toshiba, for example, were considered the people to go to for a DVD player in 2000. Now, people who know the ins and outs of the format make it a point to actively avoid Toshiba, regardless of whatever quality their players actually have. All because of one line in their 2001 ad campaign: "I want a three-step zoom to get rid of the black lines on widescreen movies".

If you think that's unrealistic or extreme, just wait until companies start trying to force us to see their ads. Companies with attitudes like Toshiba's would go out of business. Would you do business with a man who tries to tell you that you have to watch his ads?

I worked with NAMI during the Wonderland campaign. They advertised to every mental patient in America (and the rest of the English speaking world). They issued the call - this program is anti-mental patient propaganda. The mental patients of America answered it. Wonderland was pulled in a firestorm of boycotting. So I have learned enough about marketing to know how bad an idea it is to upset people.

[disturbed1]

Hmmmmm, I wonder when the last time anyone has watched a legit DVD Movie.

Maybe 50 of the last 60 I watched had some sort of PUO that didn't let you bypass the intros. I've seen MTV, Pepsi, Nike ..... ads on the discs.

I don't believe this is anything new at all. As mentioned earlier, the law is ment for the DVD Studios. The ad companies are paying big bucks to have their ads inserted, if it's too easy to bypass, then they wasted their money.

We, in this hobby, shouldn't even sweat it. It's too easy to back up a DVD, and fix it to our liking.

Ads in the middle of the movie A lot of young bucks here. I'm sure some of you remember going to the drive-in, and having an intermission with adds for popcorn and soda ..... And in the theartes they had intermission with Marlboro ads.

Seems as if people will bitch about anything at the drop of a dime, if only your bite was as loud as your bark

[Nilfennasion]

I watch legit DVDs all the time. Only thing is, they are of films I actually want to see, or have seen and would consider paying good money for (X-Men 2 comes to mind).

Thing is, without legit DVDs, our hobby would not allow us to circumvent this stuff because we wouldn't have a source. Or at least one that I would touch, but that is another matter.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000A02TZ/qid=1101125719/sr=1-1/ref=sr_...v=glance&s=dvd

The above is something anyone who thinks being forced to watch adverts can increase revenue would do well to read, by the way. I have never seen so much hatred directed at a DVD where the transfer was done right.

[maek]

Hey, at least it would still be legal to see Janet Jackson naked...who would want to fast forward that??

[Nilfennasion]

Janet Jackson naked...

[Skoorb]

Does this mean that future DVD players will be designed so that the fast forward button will be disabled (and probably also the next button) while commercials are playing or is this feature currently programmable within the dvd specs?

It's already in the specs, like with the interpol crap, or you know sometimes when you start a movie and you can't FF through the universal studios logo or something.

This would piss me off, but I'm not surprised by the gall of it. It seems like a natural thing to do, given that they can, and most people are powerless to do anything about it.

Options would include re-authoring your own copy of it, or simply decrypting to your HD, shrinking (or, as DL discs become more available, not bothering with shrinking), and simply reburning yourself a copy of the disk minus the stupid disallowed user operations, since decryptor I think already does this.

As it is I hate not being able to FF through the beginning parts of the movie that I've already seen, so it's great using backed up copies, because they don't include that nonsense.

[hhhhbk]

what a joke of a law
if dvds you rent or buy contain adverts then people will get really p***ed off
they cant expect people to pay to watch adverts even though people who pay for tv do
it will always be possible to remove it
even if dvd decrypter copies these files il just stick it through auto gk then cut off the ads at the start with nandub
are they planning on introducing new players that cant fast forward or skip chapters
this law would encourage piracy pay for adverts or download advert free version for nothing how do they come up with these stupid laws