Hacker News Reader

Comment by ansible | Hacker News Reader

For the live stream, the ads will be the same as those on the traditional television broadcast. For the on-demand programming, the typical 12 to 16 minutes of ads an hour will be reduced 25 percent.

I guess I'm not their intended customer. I'm not going to pay for a service to give me ads. If I'm watching a live show, I want the ability to pause it, walk away for a few minutes, and then skip commercials.

For on-demand content, I don't want any commercials. I don't see the value otherwise.

View on HN

The problem is the same as it is with print; the subscription fee usually only covers the cost of distribution. The cost of content is typically paid for by advertising, which brings in more than subscriptions do. This CBS streaming service is going to be $6/month. So for each million subscribers they get $6m/mo.

But CBS's most show, The Big Bang Theory, which is the most popular show in the USA in that time slot, pulls in about $6.5 million of ad revenue every episode. So CBS would need 4 million subscribers just to match the revenue stream from that one show. Put another way, they need 50k subscribers to replace the ad revenue from one single 30-second commercial spot on that same show. http://www.ibtimes.com/economics-prime-time-how-much-does-it...

This is why the economics of TV are so brutal and many shows are canceled after only a few episodes or a single season. It's not necessarily the fault of the show itself - if a new show goes up against a much stronger offering from another channel, it may not attract a critical mass of viewers and it's more economical to cancel further production and fill the time slot with repeats of more popular material that draws a reliable audience.

Now it could be possible for individual shows to break even. I don't watch a lot of TV, so I only ever watch one program on CBS, a show called Elementary. I would be willing to consider paying something like $1/episode or $25 for the whole season up front - but that has run for a few years already. For launching a new show with the production value and baseline quality of acting that a commercial audience expects, you probably can't get people to pay for it without spending the same amount of money on marketing as on the production itself. So without the cross-subsidies from advertising it would be quite difficult to raise the capital to finance new TV shows. Obviously you have alternatives depending on what sort of show you want to make, eg you can produce a wacky animated comedy relatively cheaply and launch it on YouTube or somesuch to get your initial audience critical mass. But if you want to do an hour-long serious drama or current affairs or science programming, your up front costs are far higher and you need people to open their checkbooks - your MVP probably costs at least $1 million.

Recently, I thought I'd give Hulu Plus a shot. I didn't realize I would still have advertisements after paying a monthly fee. I cancelled my subscription immediately. I don't need to watch those shows that badly.

I have been actively working on removing advertisements from my life and have found it has made my mind feel less cluttered.

Same here, I was a Hulu customer for a whole 3 hours before I committed to Netflix 2+ years ago. Ads on top of the fact that they didnt have the episodes available until days after they aired.

I'm now basic cable(+dvr) & internet ($80/mo) + Netflix $8 + AmazonPrime

possibly adding HBO soon

Do you have cable? My guess is they're targeting existing cable customers who are considering cutting the cord- those people are already paying for a service that gives them advertisements, so for them this isn't much different (in fact it's 25% less ads and potentially a much smaller cable bill).

Isn't ultra-basic cable (including CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox) around $10/month? Paying $6 for just one network with ads seems really steep.

ultra basic cable is free. Over the air broadcasts.

Except this is streaming broadcast shows, not cable (unless I missed something). This wouldn't really help cutting the cord... you could already get rid of cable and just use an antenna for CBS.

Antennas won't work for many people.

Which people? I've lived in one place where my antenna didn't work, and it was so in the middle of nowhere that slow DSL speeds would have made streaming TV content pretty unpleasant. I'd imagine many of those people already have satellite for TV and internet.

I hear downtown areas are particularly bad for OTA. I live in southern California, but far from the transmitters, and its hard to get a clean OTA signal.

* Antennas won't work for many people.*

Heh. Especially so in the Chicago market. CBS 2 Chicago (WBBM) is the only remaining VHF transmitter in the area. I can easily pull in the other UHF stations, but CBS has continued to be a problem. Reception was poor, but since February I can't get them at all. At one point during the DTV transition period, they weren't allowed (permitted?) to transmit at full power. I wonder if something similar is going on now. That, or a new building has gone up between me and downtown.

In fact, "cable TV" was invented to solve this problem. CATV=Community Antenna TV

You can think of this as just another physical medium for transmitting the same content. We already have cable and satellite, and now there's the Internet. Of course, it does have the advantage of being available without an entire cable or satellite bundle.

The access to a large back catalog of CBS shows is, for me, a worthwhile feature.

I don't buy cable because of the commercials and I sure as hell would never pay to get commercials streamed to my tv via my internet connection.

15 bucks is probably way too high as well, considering the average cable bill is $100/mo, and that's few more channels than 1.

If this were something like 4.99/mo with no commercials I'd consider it. As it is now, I can just buy the best CBS shows on blu-ray for a lot less than $180/year.

It looks like it's $6/month, not $15. Did I miss something?

Woah... I could have sworn it said 15!

Also, no football:

"In a notable carve-out, National Football League games will not be available on the service."

Welp that's about the only thing worth watching on CBS...

This is basically retransmission fees applied directly to you instead of your cable provider. Your argument is more against retransmission fees + advertisements. For a company to be able to sell such a product/idea internally and to shareholders, they probably have to keep double-dipping. But, yes, it is annoying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com