Years ago, I would often daydream about having the ability to skip songs on the radio if I didn’t want to listen to them.  I remember when I had cable TV; I only wanted to watch a small handful of shows, and wished that I didn’t have to pay for all the other ones that I didn’t watch.  Enter streaming radio and video services.  We now have free (FREE!!) radio where we can skip songs that we don’t want to hear! We also have a very large chunk of the TV programming available for instant viewing on the Internet, all for free!  What progress we have made! Of course, not everything is streamable yet (I’m looking at you, NFL), but most things are.

There are some great streaming audio services, like last.fm, pandora.com and lala.com, or video services like nbc.com, pbs.org and hulu.com.  Unlike with the classic mediums of radio and television, this is still a relatively new service.  The methods of advertising that have always been employed for radio and television don’t translate well to streaming audio and video, and so these companies are still trying out different ways of advertising.  Some of these new methods, however, are obtrusive and annoying.

I was recently with some coworkers outside of the office, and we were listening to Pandora radio, when an ad suddenly interrupted our listening experience.  One of the people there, who shall remain nameless, declared, “I hate advertisements!”  Everybody gasped and stared, but faux pas aside, everybody knew what he really meant to say.  Pandora, according to their FAQ, is “committed to offering advertising that is short, tasteful and reasonably infrequent.”  This doesn’t really mean much, since I have had listening experiences where I hear no advertisements, and times where I get two in a row.

If I wanted to remove advertisements from Pandora, I could shell out 36 bucks a year, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of free streaming media?  No, thank you, I do not want to pay you, and so I am in full support of putting ads in these free streaming services.  I think that as long as we are being given the option of whether we pay or not, we should also be given the opportunity do decide how we will be experiencing these ads.  After all, how else are the content providers supposed to know the best way to satisfy their customers?

Let the users decide for themselves!  Some may want to start watching immediately, and would prefer to have a bunch of short advertisements strewn throughout their viewing / listening experience, while others may want to have one long advertisement at the beginning, so they could enjoy their viewing / listening experience uninterrupted.  Hulu has several different methods of advertising within their content, but my favorite is their branded entertainment selector (video above).  If other streaming media providers could just follow Hulu’s lead with this advertisement selector, I think many people would be much happier.  Even if someone ends up choosing to view their ads the same way that they are being presented right now, the fact that they are being given a choice will not go unappreciated.

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About Author: Joshua Kanner is a 2009 fall Interactive Co-Op at Dixon Schwabl. Life is not easy for an owl in the interactive department, but Joshua has persevered against the odds, against a hail of Nerf darts, and against being hit by a car.  He is also a very proficient programmer.