关注社会:你不想看广告?难!

All Americans are in Dish's debt. The satellite TV distributor has solved the great challenge of modern life: that of dragging your fat, greasy hand out of the bag of crisps, picking up the remote for the digital video recorder and fast-forwarding through the ads. Free at last!

美国人都得感谢Dish公司。这家卫星电视经销商搞定了现代生活的巨大挑战：将肥胖、油腻的手从薯片袋中抽出，拿起数码录像机遥控器，快速跳过所有广告。终于获得自由！

Dish's Hopper set-top box records the entire primetime line-up automatically each night and saves it for viewing later, advertisements removed. Three of the companies that produce that programming (News Corp, Comcast, and CBS) have greeted this breakthrough with a lawsuit, alleging that it amounts to an unauthorised video-on-demand service pushing stolen programming. This could undermine the "quality of primetime programming" by undercutting the advertising revenues that support it.

Dish公司的Hopper机顶盒能自动录下每晚整个黄金时段的电视节目，存储起来以供回放，而且剔除所有广告。制作这些电视节目的公司中，有三家以法律诉讼来回应这一突破，它们是新闻集团(News Corp)、康卡斯特公司(Comcast)和哥伦比亚广播公司(CBS)，它们指控该设备相当于未经授权的视频点播服务，推送窃取的电视节目。这样做可能减少广告收入，进而损害该收入支持的“黄金时段节目的质量”。

Advertising is crucially important to TV. PwC, the professional services firm, estimates that in 2011, 46 per cent of TV revenues came from advertising, as opposed to fees and subscriptions. At Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, the proportion is more than half, due to its strong presence in broadcast TV. Plenty of consumers use DVRs already but only about an eighth of primetime programming is watched on delay, though that is growing, according to Nielsen data. So making delayed (and adless) viewing easier is a direct threat to the content producers' business models.

广告对电视来说极为关键。专业服务公司普华永道(PwC)估计，在2011年，电视行业收入46%来自广告，而非收费和订费。在康卡斯特旗下的NBCUniversal，该比例超过一半，原因在于其在广播电视领域的强大地盘。有大量消费者已经在使用DVR数码录像设备，但据市场研究公司尼尔森(Nielsen)的数据，黄金时段电视节目中只有八分之一是录下后回放观看的，尽管这一比例正在上升。因此，令延时观看（而且不带广告）变得更为简易，直接威胁到这些内容制作者的商业模式。

The lawsuit, in the long run, matters less than how the TV distribution industry decides to manage a fundamental tension. Its customers do not like ads. Its suppliers depend on them. Of course, the simplest way to resolve the tension would be delivering adless TV, charging more for it, and passing the added revenues back to the programmers. But what if consumers, confronted with the real cost of television, decide it is not worth the money?

从长远来看，电视经销业决定如何解决根本的矛盾，似乎比诉讼本身更为重要。顾客不喜欢广告。供应商却依赖于此。当然，解决这一矛盾最简单的方式就是提供不带广告的电视、收取更高费用，并将额外收入转移给节目制作人。然而，一旦消费者在面对电视节目的真实成本时，认为它不值这个价，又该如何呢？