6th Week of Class: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

I'm watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long blog and the first notable thing occurs before the show even starts. I'm given a choice of which show to see an advertisement for: Ugly Betty, Castle, and Life on Mars. I like Castle so I clicked on that.

While I've only gotten a choice of what kind of ad to view on Hulu (sometimes you can get the rest of the show ad free if you watch a long ad at the beginning, sometimes you can choose between two different ads for the same product) ABC's player does sometimes have interactive ads at their commercial breaks. I've seen a car ad that is completely silent and lets the user click around to see the vehicles features. I've seen another ad that actually contains a game.

One of the trends with video on the Internet is that advertisers are going to take advantage of the medium and allow users to interact with the ads. It's one I personally hope continues, if only so I can 'dislike' all the ads I hate and never see them again. So far I've only seen the option to dislike or like an ad on Hulu.

But one of the things all the video sites for major networks have done is to make the content free for the end user. They're all ad supported and while they do tend to include the same number of commercial breaks that you'd get on television they all only show one ad per break on the Internet. The other trend I haven't found an exception for (at least for sites owned by networks) is the choice of Flash video. Although some sites players that require you to install an additional plugin to use their player the video itself is still Flash.

Everything else seems to vary: the quality of the video, whether the video will have the option of HD, whether the player works in multiple browsers, DRM (I assume that's what the plugin is really for but it was really explicit when trying to view videos on TNT's site, at least at first), even whether the video can fill the screen. (Lifetime's videos for Project Runway do not fill the entire screen even on the full screen setting. It's not letterboxed either; there's black around the whole picture.)

There's a lot that must go into this: loads of storage for the video for one thing. Then there's the database for the shows, their episodes, reviews, discussions, user accounts, etc. They must have a way of automating the commercial breaks: there's too much content to have someone going into the Flash and hard coding it for each video. Not to mention the fact that the videos will have a different number of commercial breaks and at different points in the video, even for videos of the same length.