I diligently mute them, I’m a freak I cannot stand them. But from the nature of many people’s complaints about ads, it seems like they listen to them and want to retain the words they’ve said?
I solved this problem by having not watched cable television in like ten years.
same. something like 17 years here.
Caught some TV a couple months ago at my moms place, and was horrified about the amount of ad breaks and length. I don’t know how anyone can tolerate this
Frog in the pot, man. It’s crazy what people put up with. Same with rawdogging YouTube
With a DVR you haven’t had to watch a commercial on TV/cable in over 20 years. Streaming is bringing unskippable ads and surveillance. The internet is making things worse, not better.
Streaming is bringing unskippable ads and surveillance.
Torrents bring neither and are higher quality and more user friendly.
The internet is making things worse, not better.
No, it’s not. Before the Internet you could only watch what was on, when it was on.
Now you can torrent anything you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it, and in much higher quality than TV used to be. And, again, without ads, which TV has always been riddled with.
That’s infinitely better, on multiple metrics.
I don’t watch it, but I definitely second hand consume it because my parents still watch cable. I don’t really have a choice either since most every night I’m helping cook dinner while my dad watches his nightly reruns of MASH and Emergency (unless it’s something else for a change). The ads aren’t extremely unbearable because they’re aimed at middle-aged to elderly people like my dad, but I don’t care for them.
Visit a house where they have the tv on all the time. Commercials and everything. It’s harsh.
I jolly roger everything. No commercials.
Ads? Hmm. No, now that you mention it. I must be doing it wrong, because I never see ads.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
I found a cool way of ad-blocking back when I watched TV. Probably does not work anymore, and relies on Teletext page 888 (closed captions, the number varies by country) not being updated during ads.
- Mute
- Switch to another channel and back to clear Teletext cache
- Turn on fullscreen Teletext, any page (I like the 89x test patterns)
- Type “888” as the page you want to go to
- The TV will now wait for 888 to be broadcast, which only happens after ads and trailers
- The program is now running with captions. Disable Teletext and unmute if you want sound instead.
What British wizardry is this?
https://www.noblecollection.com/Item--i-PRP-HP-8050
Raise it straight up in the air and say “Addi-nau-seum” into the microphone, then quickly point it at the TV.
Sadly I don’t think Teletext has been broadcast (in the UK at least) in over a decade
It definitely still works in the Czech Republic and Germany. Our pre-2023 president was an avid user. Public TV stations hand-format their own and syndicated news for 39 columns and pick monthly poetry. Commercial stations just automatically jam syndicated news into the format, sometimes overflowing to another subpage just by 1 word, and host huge amounts of banner and fullscreen ads with meh graphics by Teletext standards, mostly for dodgy phone services like tarot and erotic hotlines. They also host “chat24”, probably the worst message board ever: imagine a public IRC room but $0.50 per message (by SMS) including setting your nickname and color.
Ads?
I stopped watching TV some 15 years ago or smth.
I don’t watch shit with adds lol. I just recently learned that in the US Netflix, Amazon Prime and the such offer paid subscriptions that still show adds. Like what the actual fuck? Just pirate at that point, the bad sites have an equal share of adds and the good ones have none, it’s a much better experience.
Ads aren’t a thing in my life. On the off day I have to visit someone who lives with ads and suffer through one or two I tough it out, or look at my phone, or do something different.
I don’t watch live TV. I dont pay for any subscription services except phone service and internet data. I watch YouTube content that has the ads stripped out. I download youtube videos that get often rewatched to hard drive. For movies I buy DVD that can have the drm stripped out.
I play good video games preferably drm free (steam is the one service I can’t really give up easy, but it has offline mode and the deck so praise gaben!). I read e-books that are drm free. I have a mp3 player downloaded with all my music drm free.
The better question is, why are you willing to live with ads at all? Assuming you are in control of your living situation and have the power change whats shown on tv or played through speakers.
Why would you tolerate being constantly bombarded with manipulative messaging by companies, political canpaigns, and all the other powerful groups who want to affect he masses for their benefit?
Why is it so hard just say no? To give up the forms of toxic entertainment delivery? Why can’t you sacrifice ease and convinence and familiarity to regain some control overhow your attention is spent during free time?
If you like something, buy it and really take the steps to own it physically.
I have not put myself in a position to be forced to watch ads in a very long time. Even when I had normal TV service I was recording shows to a computer that would identify the commercials to automatically skip them when I watched a show. But I guess I’m not anywhere near normal in that regard.
No TV, no ads. Simple.
My spouse and I have not been forced to watch a TV-ad since the late 90S. Since the day we got rid of our TV once and for all, when we realized the were expecting us to pay good money to buy a TV set and then still have to watch their ads, and more and more of them? Not the best deal. So thx, but no. 25 years later, we still have to regret it once ;)
Do you watch any streaming services or do you mean zero tv, no shows, nothing?
Do you watch any streaming services or do you mean zero tv, no shows, nothing?
We do, from time to time. We will subscribe for a month to such or such streaming and watch the few content we’re interested in. Most of the time, though, there isn’t that many stuff we really want to watch. And if you’re wondering, we watch content on simple computer screen (hooked to a Linux machine) that has nothing ‘smart’ in it — it just displays pixels.
Note that a few years ago, when they all started appearing, we were subscribed to quite a few services and that was fun, at the beginning. Alas, we quickly grew tired of always being fed the same kind of politically correct, highly sanitised, and very… formatted type of content. Like with books, my spouse and I both enjoy challenging content (which includes being confronted to things and thoughts we will deeply disagree with). Don’t get me wrong, there are a few very high quality content that is streamed, just not enough to our taste for us to be willing to pay the always more expensive monthly fee they’re asking for it.
That said, we own a large DVD collection, which we prefer to streaming because:
- We paid for them once, some 20+ years ago. No lifetime rent.
- In the same logic: nowadays used DVDs are dirt cheap and one could easily build their dream library for almost nothing.
- We’re not tracked while watching them.
- We’re free to watch whatever we want. It doesn’t matter if it is trendy or not, if it’s popular or not, if it’s decades or a century old. We own it? We can watch it.
- Last but not least, there is no one that can come at our place to modify the DVDs we own. Be it to remove some content that would be considered unacceptable today (or tomorrow), to change or to add something in it, or even to delete the whole DVD. We paid for that plastic disc, we legally own it. Even if the almighty Sony, Warner, HBO, Universal or Whomever changed their mind and wanted to take it back, they can’t. Unlike what we have already seen happening more than once with digital content being modified or deleted, or less dramatically but as efficiently as far as censoring goes ‘not being available anymore’.
This is also why I quit reading ebooks almost completely, to read printed books again. I don’t want anyone to be able to remotely edit or delete a book from my bookshelves (Hi Amazon, please go kindly sit your naked ass on some cactus), nor to feel entitled to look over my shoulder while I’m reading so they could ‘data mine’ my reading habits.
Wooops, sorry for this lengthy and ‘ranty’ reply. Hope you won’t mind ;)
I agree with a lot of what you said. It’s why I buy my disks. Can’t be deleted.
I am going to disagree with one item. You say you don’t have a tv. The screen you use to display the image is effectively a tv. So in essence you still have one. You just don’t have cable tv or an aerial antenna. You even use the streaming services from time to time.
But otherwise yeah I definitely understand where you are coming from.
I am going to disagree with one item. You say you don’t have a tv. The screen you use to display the image is effectively a tv. So in essence you still have one. You just don’t have cable tv or an aerial antenna. You even use the streaming services from time to time.
Well, technically it is not a tv since it has not the thingy (whatever the technical term is) that makes any TV able to receive a signal and transcode into a meaningful image all by itself. The thing that makes it so you just plug the TV to a cable or an antenna and get some content. Our screen needs to be plugged into a computer to do the work of creating the image the screen is displaying. Here in France, every household is required to pay a tax on the TV sets they own, for many decades, computer screens were not concerned by the tax because they could not do that stuff a TV does, so they were not considered TV.
But I understand what you mean. I was… misleading.
To make myself clearer maybe I should have said that we own screens (more than one, as we both work from home and own more than one computer each) but no TV set and have not owned one since the late 90s, and probably never will again. Edit: we watch stuff on screens, obviously, we just do not watch TV content.
re-edit: typos
Ain’t no ads on Jellyfin.
I stopped watching ‘tv’ because of ads. No way will I pay for ads or be subjected to them as best I can.
This is the way.
Finding other ways to get your media that doesn’t blast you with ads.
Or if it always blasts you with ads, find a way to block them.
Don’t let the terrorists win.
That’s one of the reasons I cut the cord.
And unsubscribed from Netflix/Prime when they started asking for more money for ads.
And freak out whenever the weird hacky fix from the depths of Lemmy that kills youtube ads stops working for a day.
Ads are the goddamn worse, Carpenter had them dead to rights in They Live.
My TV lets me pause live TV, so I pause, leave the room for a bit, come back and fast forward through the ads.
DVRs are great. I don’t think they’re really a thing much anymore, I guess because of the declining popularity of FTA TV. Is this a feature that’s built in to your TV or is it a separate DVR? How long have you had it?
I’m not American. I don’t know what those terms mean. I just have a skybox.
I’m from Australia, I haven’t seen them for a long time but around the mid 2000s to early 2010s we had products that were like set-top boxes that were variously referred to as PVRs (personal video recorder) and DVRs (digital video recorder). They had digital TV tuners in them and hard drives and would prebuffer paused TV up to a set amount of time allowing you to skip through ads and pause a show as you describe and they usually had more than one TV tuner in them so you could go through the Electronic Program Guide menu and set it to record another show while you watched or recorded a different one. My parents had one and it was great. I guess growing up with Free to Air TV, the novelty and unusualness of consuming media this way and not having to miss the show to get up for tea or not having to suffer the ads and just hitting fast forward still resonates with me even though now the idea of having to watch stuff on a schedule is becoming a weird and alien limitation that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Ironically though now you’d have a tougher time evading the ads in some contexts despite watching almost whatever you want whenever you want.
Jellyfin has a built in DVR. It works with HD Homerun tuners.
i have not owned a television since I was a child and came to develop my quirky ad-reviling character trait
