Online ads
This article spurred me to write about something that’s bugged me for a while. Why don’t ad agencies host MPEGs of all the TV commercials they’ve produced? Or even better, why don’t advertisers host their commercials online? Why wouldn’t they want to distribute commercials to people who actually want to watch them?
I have seen a few archives of ads, but they don’t cover everything, and they often seem to be low-quality encodings off a TV tuner.
There’s a Denny’s ad of a chicken dancing on a fence from the mid 1990s that I’d love to watch again. Or heck, any Old Navy ad with pre-supermodel-era Molly Sims in it (hi Mary! I’ll just go ahead and make up my bed on the couch tonight).
I’m sure there’s some sinister force at work I know nothing about that means it’s legally, economically, and politically impossible to easily choose to watch commercials that aren’t broadcast on TV. It can’t be technological reasons, especially if BitTorrent makes hosting costs practically nonexistent.