Is It Now Time For Blipverts?

This past television season has seen an amazing shift in the entertainment viewing landscape. Due to a ripening of a variety of media, we have finally entered the nirvana of on-demand entertainment. The question is: how to monetize it?

Broadband availability (even by the slow U.S. standards), improved data streaming protocols, and a willingness to adapt to reality has allowed Internet access to video libraries to flourish like never before. Of course, the current star of this wave is the online provider hulu.com:

What is making hulu the first-stop for on-demand viewers? Their catalog, of course, as well as its high-quality video, but also an important realization of how to garner ad revenue without also annoying your viewers: short commercials, or “blipverts”.

Hulu has rightfully surmised that people will gladly sit through a 15-second blipvert during the course of viewing in exchange for free content. Why? Because trying to avoid the ad would take at least 15 seconds. It’s not worth the effort. Additionally, the ads don’t usually screw up the viewing experience. Not only are they not so frequent as to get in the way, but they don’t demand a change in screen resolution or interaction by the viewer. This is in contrast to, say, abc.com (as of this writing) whose ads (often 30-seconds) will pop you out of full-screen, require you to restart the video, and also tend to screw up the stream.

Hulu’s strategy also allows it to rotate advertisers on the same program even with its limited ad space. Frankly, I find I pay more attention to hulu’s blipverts than I do to commercials in other venues simply because they don’t annoy the heck out of me.

The only annoying thing about hulu is that there is no easy mechanism to download content (even time-bombed content) for portable devices or for those times when the Internet is inaccessible.

I’ve been using hulu.com as an easy example, but there are scores of other video streamers out there that are also contributing to this changing landscape with their own innovations. As long as it doesn’t cause me to electrically overload and explode (see video at the end of this post), I’m happy to see what they come up with.

For my taste, I do not enjoy bugs, crawls, overlays, or anything else that interferes with what I’m trying to watch. Honestly, I think the blipvert idea is one that could also go a long way for the broadcast and cable channels.

As for blipverts and explosions: that comes from the classic and tragically short-lived ’80s series Max Headroom (this first part 1/5 of the first ep starts with 35 seconds of self promo, and subsequent parts have dubios audio synch, but the show’s a classic regardless):