Microsoft to charge per commerical skipped!

[judoGTI]

Check out this patent application. Silly microsoft is just going to piss people off


http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...DN/20050210498

[waynedunham]

Something that M$ is VERY good at. Bring on the Linux version of Sage!!

[RedR]

Good point waynedunham!! I'd give bout anything for a linux flavor of SageTV.

[spockware]

Sound like the biggest, richest software company in the world is planning to nickle-and-dime us to death as soon as we have to use it's IP TV (because they bullied out every cable and sat provider).

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by judoGTI

Check out this patent application. Silly microsoft is just going to piss people off

Nah... They'll sell a "premium" service that assumes you'll skip all of the commercials, then PAY you to watch them by giving you a credit back for each one you see. That's different, right?


-JK

[Kanati]

Please force feed me commercials... I must have mass amounts of advertising in order to subsist... I must know the wonders that is the new Ford Sheeple Mover 3000 and the creamy delights of Hostess BuyMeNows...

I'm getting so incredibly sick of advertising I think my brain is going to burst. And now we need a way to force feed them to us if we don't want to pay up??? egad.

[Mahoney]

How can that be a patent? Anyone could think that up, and anyone could implement it. It's disgraceful the way you can patent a concept, regardless of implementation.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by jkoutrouba

Nah... They'll sell a "premium" service that assumes you'll skip all of the commercials, then PAY you to watch them by giving you a credit back for each one you see. That's different, right?

I wonder if I put a small tv in the basement tuned to QVC if M$ would owe ME money?

[nielm]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

How can that be a patent? Anyone could think that up, and anyone could implement it. It's disgraceful the way you can patent a concept, regardless of implementation.

Isn't that what patents are? Protection for the first person having a unique idea?


Taken as a system as a whole (at least the parts of it I read -- My brain melted after claim #25), I find this quite reasonable -- a dynamic content charging system with costs based on bandwidth/resolution/%watched/number of commercials watched/number of devices used/number of times played.

Lets face it: Content costs money... Currently, advertising pays for the content (or at least reduces the cost for subscription-based channels), but as advertisers realise that nobody is watching the ads, they will stop paying for them.

This type of system would allow me to pay for what I watch (without subsidising the dross)... As long as the charge was sufficiently small (and I mean of the order of a few cents), I would accept this (yes, even with ad-skip and replay fees)... At least it allows you to skip adverts (unlike DVDs)

How much would you pay to watch an episode of your favorite series? (considering that a SG-1 DVD boxed set = $2.5/episode)

(Anyone work in advertising here? What is the amount of money per viewer that adverts generate for a prime-time network TV show? The only figures I found was $2.2m for a 30second ad reaching 144m viewers during the superbowl, but I don't know how many ad breaks there were)

[Mahoney]

Isn't that what patents are? Protection for the first person having a unique idea?

No, or at least I don't think so - I think they are for the first person making a unique thing. I don't think you should be able to come up with a concept and then patent it, unimplemented.

I'm far from clear how the whole patent thing ought to work in the software world; fine, copyright the code itself, but to work out that content is paid for by advertising, so if users skip advertising it needs to be paid for some other way, so it might make sense to charge them for skipping advertising - that's just a (fairly obvious) solution to a problem. You shouldn't be able to patent that and charge anyone else who does something similar!

[Kanati]

I see that the nfl is going to package up the superbowl commercials into a half hour show available on-demand within hours after the game. How would they charge for THAT?! And should I order it and just skip to the end immediately???? My brain hurts.