The End of TV Advertisements

TV broadcasters are meeting this week in Las Vegas to discuss their growing concern over cord-cutters and the resulting decline in advertisement revenue. It’s a meeting about five years too late — the horse has already left the barn.

This business model is dead.

The broadcasters will no doubt conclude the obvious: they need to make as much content as possible available online.

But where they’re going to fail is doubling down on paid advertisements.

Broadcasters need to accept that the glory days of charging upwards of millions of dollars for a 30-second advertisement spots are over.

As much as the whole DVR/time shifting revolution has been about watching TV when you want to watch it, it has also been about avoiding the ads. After TiVo debuted in 2000, it didn’t take people long to realize that if they started watching a one hour show currently being recorded fifteen minutes into it, you could fast-forward through all of the commercials and finish the show at its scheduled end time.

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