And so it begins.



OK, now I’m sure you lot all watch wholesome TV programmes, and so won’t be seeing adverts for, ahem, more “grown up” things when your sainted aunt of the vicar calls round for tea and cucumber sandwiches.

I imagine Virgin Media won’t be far behind.

Surely there must be an opt-out or something?

Yes, you can cancel your subscription.

I was going to say something like that.

Not sure how they can do this, at least not very well. They know which packages you subscribe to - and therefore broadly which channels you watch - but they don't actually know which programmes you watch and the box has no real way to tell them, especially if you unplug the phone line to it. It might be possible if you have the Sky Anytime+ deal - because I think in that case the box is wired to the net to download stuff for on demand viewing - but for general Sky users there's no 'callback' mechanism to get the data to tailor the advertising with. That or if you use the 'remote record' function.

if those sources are all they have, the data they use to do this is going to be ropey at best and therefore the targeting will be very poor. Therefore it's likely to be no more effective than standard broadcast advertising. I'd expect it to be quietly dropped after a few months use shows it's not paying it's own way.

Jon

I don't have one, I even stopped reading The Times because of Murdoch.

It's been many years since I has a subscription to Sky but iirc leaving the phone line plugged in was part of the T&Cs. I only ever plugged it in for a few seconds at a time for movies on demand.

I know. I've had mine unplugged for years, never heard a peep from them about it. Generally speaking all it's used for is the 'interactive games', which are utterly [LIFTED], and to add items to your bill if you buy PPV movies/events, which I don't ever use. So as far as I can tell, they don't ever bother remotely checking if you have left the phone line plugged in or not. Even the 'remote record' functionality is actually piped down the satellite signal rather than over the PSTN.

Jon

I have had cable for a few years and have dropped it since my move as it was not in a cabled area. The TV service was overpriced when you considered that you still had adverts and loads of repeats. I used to look at the Radio Times for details on the channels that I did not subscribe to and felt that they had the same problems of repeats. So I was on the basic TV service though that only offered a cutdown Freeview service. The boxes do have a call back feature on the cable network, but that does not tell if you are actually watching and not making a cup of tea. Also what ads would be appropriate for a Jeremy Kyle viewer?

Hardly appropriate, but it would be loan ads. I don't really see the point of this anyway as ads are often tailored to the programme anyway. Ie, daytime telly is full of loan ads.

I suspect that primetime telly will have the more focussed ads - and advertisers will pay to get to a more targeted demographic.

I suspect that it is a ruse to get advertisers to pay even more to get to the same demographic. Though I suspect that they might be able to target ads to a region even more specifically so making it useful to advertisers.

Bachelors Mushy Peas to the north, who would have guessed?