Picture the scene. <\/p>\n
You’re travelling and Twitter tells you that the final rugby World Cup quarter final is a tight affair. There are just minutes left, and a single score could send the match either way.<\/p>\n
The final “northern hemisphere” side are fighting to stay in the competition. <\/p>\n
You fire up ITV Player on your mobile. Be damned the streaming data cost! You’ll watch the last few minutes online as your train travels along a largely 4G<\/em> route.<\/p>\n But first a pre-roll advertisement… which has to buffer before it plays.<\/p>\n You’re not interested. Time is ticking away. Sure, you know that commercial television is supported by commercials, but come on!<\/p>\n The ad ends and a loading icon appears… and appears… and appears…<\/p>\n Time passes. <\/p>\n Finally a second ad begins to play.<\/p>\n This is getting frustrating now. But you watch the ad as you have no other choice.<\/p>\n The ad ends and… another loading icon appears.<\/p>\n Oh COME ON! Not a third ad surely? <\/p>\n Well I couldn’t say for sure, because after about 30 seconds of that, I abandoned ITV Player, switched to iPlayer Radio, launched Five Live which booted up instantly<\/em> and listened to what were now the final three minutes of the fixture.<\/p>\n Radio trumps TV.<\/strong><\/p>\n (Or at least in the app world it does, particularly if it doesn’t carry ads).<\/p>\n Here’s a thought – if you’re down to the final scheduled few minutes in a live sporting fixture, then ditch the pre-roll ads. Because while pre-rolls are something the audience knows it has to “endure” ordinarily, they become a serious frustration at the end of a major fixture when the clock is ticking. And people swearing at your app and then going somewhere else is probably not what you’re after.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Picture the scene. You’re travelling and Twitter tells you that the final rugby World Cup quarter final is a tight affair. There are just minutes left, and a single score could send the match either way. The final “northern hemisphere” side are fighting to stay in the competition. You fire up ITV Player on your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,7],"tags":[29,154,556],"class_list":["post-5019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio","category-tv","tag-radio-2","tag-streaming","tag-tv"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5019"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5021,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019\/revisions\/5021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}