關注社會:你不想看廣告?難!
All Americans are in Dish's debt. The satellite TV distributor has solved the great challenge of modern life: that of dragging your fat, greasy hand out of the bag of crisps, picking up the remote for the digital video recorder and fast-forwarding through the ads. Free at last!
美國人都得感謝Dish公司。這家衛星電視經銷商搞定了現代生活的巨大挑戰：將肥胖、油膩的手從薯片袋中抽出，拿起數碼錄像機遙控器，快速跳過所有廣告。終於獲得自由！Dish's Hopper set-top box records the entire primetime line-up automatically each night and saves it for viewing later, advertisements removed. Three of the companies that produce that programming (News Corp, Comcast, and CBS) have greeted this breakthrough with a lawsuit, alleging that it amounts to an unauthorised video-on-demand service pushing stolen programming. This could undermine the "quality of primetime programming" by undercutting the advertising revenues that support it.
Dish公司的Hopper機頂盒能自動錄下每晚整個黃金時段的電視節目，存儲起來以供回放，而且剔除所有廣告。製作這些電視節目的公司中，有三家以法律訴訟來回應這一突破，它們是新聞集團(News Corp)、康卡斯特公司(Comcast)和哥倫比亞廣播公司(CBS)，它們指控該設備相當於未經授權的視頻點播服務，推送竊取的電視節目。這樣做可能減少廣告收入，進而損害該收入支持的“黃金時段節目的質量”。Advertising is crucially important to TV. PwC, the professional services firm, estimates that in 2011, 46 per cent of TV revenues came from advertising, as opposed to fees and subscriptions. At Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, the proportion is more than half, due to its strong presence in broadcast TV. Plenty of consumers use DVRs already but only about an eighth of primetime programming is watched on delay, though that is growing, according to Nielsen data. So making delayed (and adless) viewing easier is a direct threat to the content producers' business models.
廣告對電視來說極爲關鍵。專業服務公司普華永道(PwC)估計，在2011年，電視行業收入46%來自廣告，而非收費和訂費。在康卡斯特旗下的NBCUniversal，該比例超過一半，原因在於其在廣播電視領域的強大地盤。有大量消費者已經在使用DVR數碼錄像設備，但據市場研究公司尼爾森(Nielsen)的數據，黃金時段電視節目中只有八分之一是錄下後回放觀看的，儘管這一比例正在上升。因此，令延時觀看（而且不帶廣告）變得更爲簡易，直接威脅到這些內容製作者的商業模式。
The lawsuit, in the long run, matters less than how the TV distribution industry decides to manage a fundamental tension. Its customers do not like ads. Its suppliers depend on them. Of course, the simplest way to resolve the tension would be delivering adless TV, charging more for it, and passing the added revenues back to the programmers. But what if consumers, confronted with the real cost of television, decide it is not worth the money?
從長遠來看，電視經銷業決定如何解決根本的矛盾，似乎比訴訟本身更爲重要。顧客不喜歡廣告。供應商卻依賴於此。當然，解決這一矛盾最簡單的方式就是提供不帶廣告的電視、收取更高費用，並將額外收入轉移給節目製作人。然而，一旦消費者在面對電視節目的真實成本時，認爲它不值這個價，又該如何呢？
