These days most news content providers like CNN (No connection with "This is Not CNN",) Yahoo News, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, even The New York Times have started adding a ton of video content. This is even more for TV news sites, whose primary content is video. Most of these sites put this video content for free for us to watch. With the exception of The New York Times most of these sites embed a 15-30 seconds commercials between every video you watch. The Times allows you to watch ten commercial free videos per month for free. If you want more, cough up some money.
We constantly complain about excessive TV commercials. On TV, these days in a 30 minutes segment there is ten minutes of commercial programming. It has gone to such sickening level that I have stopped watching live TV programming. I resort to Netflix for movies and TV shows. For news, I subscribe to The Times' digital subscription service.
So, from today I will stop watching all online video content with the exception of my paid subscription sites, and YouTube. YouTube does give you an option to quit the commercial in a time shorter than my attention span. Some of the YouTube videos have commercials as clickable subtitles and I can live with that too.
I understand that the CNN, Fox, ABC, and other such content providers have to make money to pay for their production costs. However, the following points they simply do not understand:
We constantly complain about excessive TV commercials. On TV, these days in a 30 minutes segment there is ten minutes of commercial programming. It has gone to such sickening level that I have stopped watching live TV programming. I resort to Netflix for movies and TV shows. For news, I subscribe to The Times' digital subscription service.
So, from today I will stop watching all online video content with the exception of my paid subscription sites, and YouTube. YouTube does give you an option to quit the commercial in a time shorter than my attention span. Some of the YouTube videos have commercials as clickable subtitles and I can live with that too.
I understand that the CNN, Fox, ABC, and other such content providers have to make money to pay for their production costs. However, the following points they simply do not understand:
- Making me watch a 30 second commercial after every 2-3 minutes long video is simply beyond my attention span.
- Most of these Videos are simply too slow to load. Which adds to my 30 second of commercial time making me even more agitated.
- Making me watch repetitive commercial (especially if it is GEICO) is simply murder.
- Making me watch a commercial which has no connection with me in any form, is felony. For example: I opened a link from The Wall Street Journal website. It started with SAAS commercial. I happen to know what SAAS is. But I can say with 100% certainty that I will not use it or be influential in decision making process to purchase it.
I am not against paid subscriptions completely. However, the problem is with my paid subscription to the The Times, I am tied to Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman's opinions. From time to time, I do want to hear what Bill O'Reilly and Hanity have to say. Okay, Hanity was a joke. So, to watch them commercial free do I have to subscribe to them separately? May be there could be one paid service which gives a combined syndicated view of the news videos from a lot of sources. I know that won't happen, and I will have to continue to watch Fox News and CNN with those sickening GEICO commercials.
Let me know what you think.