Ah ads, nobody likes ads. Especially ads that postpone your enjoyment of some media -- that's why 70% of people using TiVo to timeshift television are also skipping the commercials. But there is one time each year when commercials take center stage. That's right, the Super Bowl. Every time the world's most watched yearly one day sporting event rolls around, people seem to forget their hatred of television advertising -- sometimes the high priced TV spots are more talked about than even the game itself.
And there are plenty of places to watch Super Bowl ads. There's the aptly named SuperBowl-Ads.com. There are the specialized channels on iFilm, AOL Sports, YouTube, and CBS Sportsline. But what about all the ads that get made the rest of the year? They're funny too, right?
Never fear, there is a growing breed of sites dedicated solely to TV ads as content. Below are 7 places you can go to get your commercial watching fix.
Firebrand, which launched a couple of weeks ago, is one of the newest entries to the advertising as content space. It is a curated collection of what its editors consider to be the creme-de-la-creme of television advertising. Firebrand sports one of the slickest interfaces of the bunch, and users can rate, download or embed commercials. The site was a little glitchy at times for me, in Firefox, though.
American television network TBS created Very Funny Ads to promote its yearly round up of the world's funniest television advertisements. They realized that the annual special's popularity could translate into a continuous source of revenue in the form of a web site. So far, it seems to be working. Many of the site's top ads have hundreds of thousands of views, with the most popular clocking half a million. Those aren't YouTube numbers, but for a niche video site, that's impressive -- especially considering videos from the site can't be embedded elsewhere.
AdForum has a huge selection of over 75,000 ads from over 20,000 different agencies. It is not the slickest site, but their library is certainly impressive. Unfortunately, not all of their content is available for free (some is behind a rather pricey subscription wall), and there is much to be desired from their player (which pops up in a Javascript lightbox, is Windows Media based, and doesn't allow rating or embedding -- at least not for free clips). To be fair, the site targets ad professionals and students (i.e., those studying advertising), and not the general public.
Visit4Info is a huge television advertisement repository focused on British commercials. Their library has over 47,000 TV ads from the UK. Ads can be rated, downloaded, or embedded, and the site also operates a paid, members-only site that includes more information for ad professionals. Careful, not all of the ads here are safe for work -- but then, is watching TV ads at work really ever safe? (Excepting for those who work at an advertising firm...)
YouTube certainly isn't focused on TV ads, but there are a ton of them on the site. The catch is that you have to search for them specifically (hint: try searching by brand or product). YouTubers have often expressed frustration whenever Google has tried to push ads on the site, but just check out this search for Sony Bravia to see just how popular ads on YouTube can be -- many of these ads have a few hundred thousand views.
AdCriticCreativity is an online magazine about the ad industry that takes the place of the old AdCritic site, which is where I remember watching TV ads online in the late 90s. Their AdCritic section still houses an impressive repository of TV, print, and interactive advertising. Their ads are posted at a higher quality than many of the other sites in this roundup (example), and members can rate and review them.
Have a hankering from some old school advertising? Retrojunk has your back with an archive of classic TV commercials from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Who could forget the infamous Where's the Beef? ad, for example? Retrojunk isn't the easiest site to get around, but users are encouraged to rate ads by whether they remember them or not, so the most memorable are easier to locate.
Bonus Site
The most frustrating part of ads is not always just having to sit through them, sometimes it's hearing a great song, getting it stuck in your head, and then not being able to figure out what it is. Enter AdTunes, a massive forum community where people discuss the music used in television advertisements. This site has lead me to such gems as "Noah's Arkestra" by Mountains in the Sky a song used in NBA Finals commercials a few years ago (actually, you can watch it yourself).
For a competition that still hasn't officially launched, the Automotive X-Prize has certainly been doing a pretty good job of making itself known, and we've now got yet more details on it courtesy of the folks at CNET. First up, it seems that the X-Prize Foundation will finally get official with the competition "sometime next year," although likely not before the New York Auto Show in the spring. Before that, however, the Foundation will be showing off some or all of the 43 contenders currently signed up at the Detroit Auto Show in January including, among others, Aptera's 300 mile-per-gallon car pictured above. What's more, given that the competition only seeks to find a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon, it would seem that Aptera would have a considerable advantage -- assuming it can actually back up its claims, that is. Hit up the read link below for a peek at some of the other competitors.
We've taken a "don't stop believing" approach to Apple ultraportable rumors up to this point, and there's no reason to think these "fresh" predictions from CNBC's Jim Goldman are anything different, but they at least serve as a nice refresher in the lead up to Macworld in January. Goldman predicts the new Pro laptop will be half the thickness of the MacBook Pro, the hard disk will be replaced with NAND storage, and Apple will be selling the thing for $1,500 -- the same price the black MacBook currently goes for. He's purportedly citing sources that claim to have seen the product, and says that the laptop is supposedly due to show up at Macworld. Jim's sources also say that the 3G iPhone is supposed to hit shelves by late May or early June of next year, which beats out some industry predictions of a late '08 release.
Of course, since it's just a month before Macworld, it's about time the rumor mill heated up a little beyond incessant Macbook and iPhone rumorings, and MacBidouille is stepping up to stoke the flames. The French rag is claiming that the Mac Pro will get bumped to an 3.2GHz eight-core Penryn setup ( totallybelievable) featuring NVIDIA QuadroFX graphics (sure) with a BTO Blu-ray burner available (maybe), and that DVD Studio Pro will be renamed Disk Studio Pro and refocused on BD authoring (another definite maybe). On top of that, MacBidouille also claims that OS X 10.5.2 will be released, and that it will be "the largest and most important intermediate system update ever released by Apple." We're a little less sure we buy that, but as always, only time and Steve will tell.
[Thanks, L2 and Mark]
Read - Jim Goldman predictions Read - MacBidouille predictions
We've already seen some of Sarcos' robotics gear put to some slightly frightening use in the form of a military exoskeleton, and it now looks like one of the company's full-fledged robots is getting a chance to strut its stuff as well, with a little help from the folks at Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute. As New Scientist reports, they've developed some software that allows the robot to stay on its feet when its bumped, shoved or even kicked (which makes mere dynamic balancing robots look positively inadequate). The key to that, it seems, is that the robot's joints are never kept rigid, which allows them to give slightly when any of the array of sensors detect the slightest jolt, giving the software a chance to then adjusting the robot's feet as necessary to keep its balance. Not surprisingly, they don't seem to have given the robot the ability to shove back just yet, but you can check out its current capabilities in the video available at the site linked below.
In what's becoming a common strategy by patent plaintiffs to try and speed up the settlement process, IBM has asked the United States International Trade Commission to ban imports of Asus computers due to claimed patent violations. The two companies had a patent license that expired in December of 2004, and IBM says Asus has continued to use the disputed tech since that time, in both Asus-branded machines and machines it's OEM'd for others, like Apple and Dell. IBM isn't getting specific about which patents are being infringed, except to say that it's three patents that cover "important aspects of computer systems, including power supplies, computer cooling and computer clustering capabilities." As always with ITC hearings, there's a 45-day window for the Commission to make a determination, so you may want to snap up that Eee PC sooner rather than later.
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