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This puts an actual smile on my face:
Media companies, including Time Warner Inc., 21st Century Fox Inc. and Viacom Inc., have started cutting back on commercials after years of squeezing in as many ads as possible.
The new strategy is an attempt to appeal to younger viewers, who are more accustomed to watching shows ad-free on online streaming services like Netflix Inc., and to advertisers concerned their messages are being ignored amid all the commercial clutter.
Time Warner's truTV will cut its ad load in half for prime-time original shows starting late next year, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bewkes said last week on an earnings call. Viacom has recently slashed commercial minutes at its networks, which include Comedy Central and MTV. Earlier this month, Fox said it will offer viewers of its shows on Hulu the option to watch a 30-second interactive ad instead of a typical 2 1/2-minute commercial break. Fox says the shorter ads, which require viewers to engage with them online, are more effective because they guarantee the audience's full attention.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday November 13 2015, @08:36AM
Now apparently advertisers are less willing to pay for ads. So - will creators stop creating? My guess is, no. In fact, I think we'll see an improvement in quality of the art.
Unfortunately, the changes in novel publishing has already shown us that the quality dramatically decreases. Creators don't stop creating, but two things change:
1) They stop dedicating long periods of full-time work to producing one high-end creation, instead either creating in very brief periods when all of their other responsibilities (paying career, family, sleep, nutrition, household, etc.) are taken care of, and/or try to churn out creations as rapidly as possible; the end-result, either way, is markedly decreased speed and quality.
2) Unless required by a paying patron/publisher, they stop spending time on the hard, incredibly frustrating task of working with other pros to polish their creation until it's the best they can make it. It's the creative equivalent of a programmer methodically finding & squashing bugs by manually reading code: it will result in a much higher-quality end product, but it's such a pain in the ass that people often abandon or completely restart projects to avoid spending time on it.
As a parallel, look at the state of many non-professional (paid) software projects: they happily blast through the exciting/fun part of initial creation, but then when it comes to the long, boring hours of tracking down & squashing bugs, they rapidly lose interest and either drift away from the project or decide to start over from scratch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @12:33PM
Unfortunately, the changes in novel publishing has already shown us that the quality dramatically decreases.
Quality is subjective, so this is meaningless.
As a parallel, look at the state of many non-professional (paid) software projects
But look at non-free proprietary user-subjugating software and what you'll see is a lack of respect for users' freedoms, many abusive 'features', a lack of security, and the same problem that you just mentioned.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Friday November 13 2015, @01:43PM
As a parallel, look at the state of many non-professional (paid) software projects: they happily blast through the exciting/fun part of initial creation, but then when it comes to the long, boring hours of tracking down & squashing bugs, they rapidly lose interest and either drift away from the project or decide to start over from scratch.
That's not what I actually see when I look at free software. The website we're posting on is built using several such free software packages, many of which have spent countless man hours fixing bugs and bringing up quality.
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