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I’m old, so many may not relate. I remember when the big selling point of this newfangled “cable TV” thing was zero ads. Can you imagine that?
Yeah, I have Prime for the savings on shipping. Got the Kodi addon for watching Prime, never used it except to watch The Expanse a few years ago. Would have been fucking enraged if I had seen ads cut into that. Fuck am I paying for?!
I think about this all the time. Kids today have no experience of the media without ads. Like we had commercials, but imagine Mr. Rogers stopping his show every 5 mins to sell you athletic greens and test boosters.
This image has a totally different context today then when it was first created
Anyways, these kids will grow up and make even worse and more annoying ads. They’ll be the next Gen of marketing executives in a decade or two. There’s nothing we can do about it.
I prefer the obvious product placement in old movies, tv shows. How funny it is to see product placement all over the place on the kitchen shelves of Seinfeld, the sugar cookie of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.
The list could go on.
Larry David said Seinfeld was just before studios did product placement deals and that they missed out on a lot of extra money from it. He said a lot of things they referenced were just plot devices. I’d say the one clear exception was George and his Rolled Gold pretzels that he was a commercial spokesman for at the time.
I don’t know about Seinfeld, but I know in Friends, they used look-alike, but not real products.
It’s not Sprite, it’s Sprita. Same logo (for the time), but not the same.
It wasn’t skittles, it was skitles.
You see where I’m going with this. They wanted the feel of a real apartment, without the legal trouble from using real products.
Honestly product placements in shows often made them feel more real. Yeah they’re drinking Coke…that’s what me and my friends do too. Products are already placed all over my house.
Fucking weird, isn’t it? Another rant would be about where is all the advertising money coming from?! Imagining being a buyer, I’d have to wonder how well my spend would be profiting.
A couple of decades ago I played around with being a salesman. Top advice was to try this ad, try that ad, compare results. Surely these people are finding revenue from spending on these ads? It just seems impossible to me that there’s profit for all of these cockroaches.
There are so many garbage ads out there now that either advertising is very cheap or businesses are pissing away lots of money.
I think a lot of it is a MAD scenario.
imagine Mr. Rogers stopping his show every 5 mins to sell you athletic greens and test boosters.
Or imagine the Flintstones advertising cigarettes to kids in the middle of the show.
Or comedy shows named after the sponsoring toothpaste company with sponsor breaks throughout.
Sure it’s gotten really bad lately, but mass media has always been rife with obnoxious advertising, both in-your-face and subliminal. The early days of Netflix streaming were really the anomaly as far as access to non-pirated ad-free media. The broadcast TV generation had their coping mechanisms with the mute button and eventually DVRs, but “media without ads” has basically never been a thing.
I have Prime too for shopping mainly. I also can’t use Prime Video because it refuses to go beyond 480p on Firefox for Linux (Atleast last time I tried).
Cable tv wasn’t invented to have zero ads . The original selling point of cable tv was to provide broadcast tv to those that couldn’t pick up OTA broadcasts.
I feel like you weren’t there, in that time and place. Or maybe you were in some weird pocket where OTA wasn’t available? Can’t remember anyone bitching about lack of antennae service. Yeah, it could be sketchy, but I think most of us could drag in ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS.
I grew up in the 70’s and had cable TV as soon as long as I could remember and it was the exact same broadcasts people that lived in DC or Baltimore got, we just got them from cable since the mountains we lived in prevented any OTA from getting through. And I am pretty sure I wasn’t alone with my cable TV.
In 1968, 6.4% of Americans had cable television. The number increased to 7.5% in 1978. By 1988, 52.8% of all households were using cable. The number further increased to 62.4% in 1994. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television)
I think one could argue they invented cable TV so that more people could see ads, not to stop showing ads.
Well radio was originally mostly about advertising, and when TV came around it was just gonna be radio but with moving pictures! So yeah, it was about spreading more advertisements around to more people.
What. Cable has only been available in cities and you could get the OTA Chanel’s.
What? Not everyone lives in or near a metro area. Some people live in valleys or mountains where an OTA signal doesn’t reach. I should know that is where I grew up.
Plus if you read up on the history of cable TV you will find that it was invented for just those reasons.
“At the outset, cable systems only served smaller communities without television stations of their own, and which could not easily receive signals from stations in cities because of distance or hilly terrain”
It isn’t that hard to read up on it and understand the history. Instead I guess just downvote because you don’t like the answer.
I recently did the same on my jellyfin server. 100x the ads actually.
I’ll do you one better. I’m upping the ads on mine by 1,000,000x.
Also be aware that Amazon donated one million dollars to the Trump inauguration and is a sponsor of the Jun 14 military parade.
Piracy, pirate and remember if you want to be free then a pirates life is the life for me.
Amazon is clearly struggling financially, and needs the revenue. Think of the starving investors!
It’s like they want me to sail the high seas
I worry the average person has no idea how to torrent.
The average person doesn’t even have a proper computer anymore. I guess you’re can still torrent on your phone but I’ve not tried it.
I’ve torrented on my Android phone and watched Christopher Nolan movies on it.
(Heresy I know, but it’s called poverty)
I just use Stremio on everything now with the usual plugins and a debrid service sub. I could do it old school on mobile, but navigating Android is baseline a tedious slog even while knowing what I’m doing.
Kodi on a Google chromecast with a real-debid account. A liile complicated for non technical to configure but so smooth once setup. https://github.com/umbrellaplug/umbrellaplug.github.io
To be fair, when I first got access to the internet as a kid, I also didn’t know.
It look me like a couple years of being tired of shitty ad-ridden streaming sites and digging through the internet before I even heard of The Pirate Bay and Torrents (Thanks to r/piracy btw 😎)
And I double my piracy. Checkmate, corporations.
Nice I love it. We didn’t stop ads years ago. Content creators deserve to be paid right guys. Right!!
Maybe the next Internet we can be more proactive. Whenever that is
I mean yes they deserve to get paid. Do you do stuff for free? I mean it’s funny how people complain about ads but nobody is willing to pay for anything.
Yeah, people create stuff online without getting paid all the time. We literally built the Internet that way. Go back to the early days forums, blogs, dumb memes, personal websites, fan videos none of that was about money. People made stuff just to share it, to be part of something, or just because they wanted to.
It’s only after financial incentives got introduced ads, sponsorships, “influencer” money that everything started getting worse. Suddenly it’s all algorithm-chasing. Everyone’s copying each other, following trends, tweaking thumbnails, timing posts. The content got way more polished, surebut also way more boring. It’s all the same stuff over and over.
So yeah, people deserve to get paid if that’s what they want. But pretending like people only create if they’re paid is just wrong. Humans naturally create. Always have. We write songs, we draw, we tell jokes. Money didn’t start that, it ruined it. It made it a job. It made it about likes and reach and SEO. It turned the internet into a shopping mall.
Now everything online feels fake. Safe. Recycled. All because the moment you attach money to something, people start optimizing for profit instead of originality. That’s the trade-off.
That’s why I cancelled my Prime subscription. After that, Amazon randomly re started my Prime subscription, twice; that’s why I deleted my Amazon account.
You guys get ads on Prime?
You guys got Prime?
Yeah, and I don’t get why. I don’t pay for it. Got it once and cancelled it but somehow the account is still active.
No, a good adblocker takes care of that.
I think we just don’t get them in the EU. With or without adblocker
I think it simply promotes other prime video content instead of product advertisement.
Nope.
Yaar, I’ve not had any streaming services for a good few years now. Shiver me timbers, matey!!
Good thing I cancelled prime along with all my subscriptions and accounts with US companies just after Trump was elected.
Still less than cable/broadcast which runs fifteen to twenty minutes of ads per hour. Given time, I’m sure streaming will catch up.
Just a matter of time until you can’t chose what to watch on the lowest tier, you have to follow their playlist of what you should watch.
And we have come full circle back to broadcast TV
The irony of streaming services
Streaming costs billions a year for each service out there. Paramount has to cut its losses by cancelling shows, and Amazon with ROP draining so much
Exactly, I miss more ads in my life*. Amazon is truly lacking.
Trying to recoup the lost from spending too much on ROp series
Do you know how many ads are on Jellyfin?
that’s why I stopped watching prime video movies
Glad I cancelled Prime some time ago. Haven’t missed it and I usually get free shipping anyway by buying elsewhere. I’ll even pay more to avoid Amazon.
Are you me? (I don’t mean name wise)
