Online video has long enjoyed fewer ads than cable or broadcast television, but Comcast is looking to change that with its TV Everywhere initiative.
Programming for TV Everywhere, which will provide on-demand online television for cable subscribers only, will likely carry just as many advertisements as cable, the Wall Street Journal reports. TNT's "The Closer" and TBS's "My Boys," for example, will bring all of their ads online. That means roughly four times as many commercials as the typical load on a free-to-watch video site such as Hulu.
This was hinted at in June, when Comcast's senior vice president of new media, Matt Strauss, told the LA Times that the cable company would be testing the same volume of ads online. After a recent rush of content providers signed on to TV Everywhere this week, the ad strategy is becoming clearer. Vivi Zigler, president of NBC Universal Digital Entertainment, told the Journal that more ads are inevitable "to sustain what it costs to make premium shows."
But not everyone in the industry is happy about it. Advertisers pay more for online ad spots because their commercials stand alone. Hulu, for example, shows one ad for each commercial break, in turn making them more valuable. It's hard to say how even one more consecutive commercial would sour consumers' taste for online advertising as a whole.
On one hand, Comcast is in the best position to experiment with a full load of ads, because TV Everywhere is essentially a duplicate of the cable service, only on a computer. True, the content will be on-demand rather than on a schedule, but the revenue model is the same, with viewers paying to subscribe.
Nonetheless, the decision to simply dump all of television ads onto the Web seems like a missed opportunity to try more creative ways of marketing. Comcast, along with partnering companies such as Time Warner Cable, are billing themselves as leaders, but in the ad space they're taking a step backwards.