Hopper

   I guess I'm kind of invested in the idea of consumer rights, so I've got sort of an obligation to know what I'm talking about on issues of piracy, anti-piracy, creators' rights, and commercialization and advertising. This  particular story deals with many of those issues, so it's especially delicious.

   I had speculated that DISH Hopper might work through some payment mechanism, some form of micro-payments where DISH somehow automatically pays the advertisers a nominal fee for the commercials skipped during that time, so that was how that worked. This would, of course, be giving money to the companies/entities advertising there, whether the household would have bought the product or not and regardless of whether they even would-- whether they even agree with the politics of what's being advertised. Which would create an interesting conundrum. To... ad, or not to ad, I guess it would be. Either you don't have to deal with that crap in the first place, or you pay attention to what they have to say and thus not have to give them money. A big NO SOLICITING sign, paying someone not to bother you.

   Nope, nothing of the sort. It just... skips right over 'em. "Hops" right over those suckers. Like a DVR fast forwarding through them, only the fast forward is automatic. It's just the equivalent of... not watching the commercials in the first place. Mmm. Cue evil laughter.

   But it doesn't skip commercials outright. Well, it does, but, let me rephrase that. Hopper doesn't skip all the commercials all the time. You earn points, of a sort, by watching television with commercials in, which allows you to watch an hour of television without commercials. So the advertisers aren't completely cut out of the loop. But some would say that this is worse.

   In a sense, this extends beyond the apparent nefariousness of letting consumers watch commercial-free TV (horrors!) because it creates a reward system for television-watching in itself. Watch four hours of TV with us, we reward you an extra hour sans commercials! Gamification of television. Turning TV watching into a game, with its own reward system. Advertisers like to pile on rewards and create Skinner boxes for their consumers, but this is some next-level meta...ness... right here. Right here. The product, the middleman itself. The very medium of television is getting in on it. How cyberpunk. How postmodern. And actually pretty awesome.

   But it's what the consumers want.