Check this out: IBM had patented a way of putting commercials in your DVDs! Who can we write to to complain?
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/11991.cfm

Moving this to Movies For Modelers, a much more appropriate place for it to be...........

I think no government agency will fight that. It will be up to the consumers to boycott the DVDs, or mouth off on blogs and websites to create a backlash.

Sorry, in my stunned disbelief at this, I completely forgot there were other forums here.
Beside the picture quality, the lack of commercials is the close #2 reason for getting DVDs in the first place. With the writers on strike now to try to get paid for DVDs and downloads, I can just see the studios jumping on this idea. And there wouldn't be any FCC limit to the amount of commercials they could pack into your old favorite shows, either.
Let the backlash begin, please.

Thankfully I have bought most of my favorite old shows already. No one hit me for this, but I do think it would be cool to have retro commercials put into old shows that had them. So if you want to recreate an afternoon of classic broadcast tv complete with commercials, that would be the way to do it. It would have to have an "on" or "off" choice of course.

I would PAY to have the original commercials in my TOS STAR TREK DVD's...that would be so right! seeing adds for the 68 Mustang and Toy adds.

Make it optional like sound settings?

I don't mind the commercials as long as it brought down the price and we could skip over them.

I HATE commercials! :mad:
All day long it's :"Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!Gimme your money!"

I buy the DVDs to avoid commercials. If they're going to start
putting commercials on them, too, I'll stop buying and go read a book.

Besides, some buy for archival purposes. How relevant will they be
in just a few months, and years?

Besides, some buy for archival purposes. How relevant will they be in just a few months, and years?

For archival purposes, if they included the original commercials, then your archive would be more complete. However, with the new media systems of commercial insert for individual regions done by Cable and satellite advertising, what you see during the show is not what I see during the same time slot. That is why you always see comercials blip for about half a second and then switch to a different one. Someone missed their cue at the engineering stations at the cable insert company.

I will EXPECT the DVD's to be free, and the commercials to PAY for this Just like the commercials on free TV do. If not, I will scratch tehm and return as scratched.

I will admit I dont know all the facts, but I bet you all the writers are already overpaid (to our standards anyway) but they are just greedy buttheads who want more money. And who pays for it? we do.
As if it isnt annoying enough that you cant skip past the first five minutes of a dvd with all that federal law and fancy company crap, commercials will make me not buy them. Besides, new dvds are expensive anyway. I just go on ebay or amazon or half.com and get it a lot cheaper.

The commercials won't be retro, unless the advertisers still sell those products advertised in the spots. Why should they pay to put the spots in the DVDs otherwise? And why should the studios place those spots in the DVDs if they weren't going to get paid for them?

No, these will be new spots for new products or services, with the potential to have updated spots (maybe) automatically downloaded so the advertiser can try to push the latest and greatest thing.

Nope guys, it's just greed. The studios "own space", which is the DVD, and now they're trying to sell that space. If advertisers could beam images onto our retinas, they would.

If this comes to pass, I'm boycotting.

(... and this has nothing to do with writers -- they certainly don't have the power to add commercial spots to a DVD. That's the studios' doing.)

Out of curiosity, how many people here who say they would boycott DVDs with commercials still go to the movies?
And I consider those damn previews on DVDs commercials as well - especially ones that are coded so that you can't skip over them...come to think of it, the previews in the movies are commercials as well...

I hate those commercials you can't skip over. But I don't know which DVDs have them, so I can't make an informed choice. Anyway, I let 'em run and go get a snack until the menu pops up.

As for movie theatres, yeah, I booed when the spots first appeared, but now, like the rest of us, I just sit through them, since they're not that bad. For now.

If anything turns me away from the theatre, it'll be the jerks in the audience, not the commercials. We don't see blockbusters at multiplexes any more for that reason. So far, so good.

But, point taken ...

We're not talking about commercials that precede the main feature - whether home video or cinema. The article is about advertsing inserted into the DVD that will interrupt the feature at regular intervals.

It doesn't take much forebarance to live with forced ads before a picture. I won't be goint to the the cinema for films that stop every twenty minutes for a sportscar ad, and I won't be buying discs that do the same.

Ah, but the thrust of the ad is that you won't have to - as long as you buy the more expensive disc withut the ads.

Hey, where's the angry-face icon? Don't we have an angry-face icon? This thread needs angry-face icons! :p


Filmmakers will be incensed over this, and will not be silent. The question is how much pull will they have in killing the idea.

^ You mean like this one :mad:

I haven't read the article, but that won't stop me from expressing my opinion: this bites, but it's not unexpected. Some networks mimic commercial breaks if you watch online. I did that for a missed episode of "Lost" and was ticked that it broke for a 1 minute commercial break. That they do this on a DVD... grrr. You already paid for the frickin' disc, so at $X price your purchase should have already offset the cost of producing it!

I still say scratch e'm and return as damaged to the place ya bought 'em. THEY will return them to the bloodsucking studios for replacements so after a while we've scratched ALL OF THEM! Ya with me boys???

yes, vandalism is such a proper response.

Oh, and you would rather knuckle under to the latest greed scam so the DVD products continue to degrade, and you continue to pay for those commercials? If they sit in the stores, they will eventually be bought, and the studios get th money. Damaged items cost the studio. They are stupid but they would get the message.

No, I just will not buy them.