Saboth wrote on Dec 27, 2023, 20:58:
I'd say for 1/3 of my life I was subjected to commercials, but we had broadcast TV, meaning it was free.
Free TV with ads is still a thing. There are a number of channels that operate that way (Pluto, Roku, Freevee, Tubi, etc.)
Now they want us to pay a subscription to also watch commercials.
Just like most of us did through the 80s and 90s (even me, and I was perpetually poor.) In other words, cable.
Back in them there olden days, the thing we hated the most was paying for 20+ stations we didn't want in order to get access to one that we did. You want the ping-pong channel? You can only get it in a package deal with 25 other sports channels. We wished we could just order the channels individually, and even joked about being able to pick which shows we watched and when (that didn't happen until VCRs became affordable, or, later with the DVR.) We're getting now what we wished for then.
But I agree that ads today are awful. They used to be designed for 30-second slots. Now they're designed for 10-15 second slots and try to jam their entire pitch into those few seconds to appeal to the YouTube/TikTok crowd. And since they can assign ads based on the individual rather than the channel/content, you tend to get spammed with the same ads, over and over. The big problem is going to be if they start handling ads the way YouTube does, where you can get three separate sets of ads on a four-minute video.
The death of the Golden Age of Streaming will most likely just launch a new Golden Age of Piracy.