> "...why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in..."
The lesson is you can't pay the danegeld to make a problem go away - the only lasting solution is to get the power and sovereignty to do it yourself. Or as Kipling put it - "But Iron – Cold Iron – is master of them all."
Here in France, some Internet+television providers have started implementing a new rule : you can't skip commercials on recorded shows.
It was entirely dictated by TV channels, in order to close the obvious "recording loophole" : instead of watching the show in their VOD app, you could record it, and obviously skip all commercials.
Now you can't anymore. There's even a small dialog when you try that tells you that "Due to a specific demand by <TV Channel>, skipping is a disabled feature."
In Switzerland there's another solution: the streaming providers (Sunrise, Teleboy) insert their own ads if you choose to skip the channel ads. To be fair, Teleboy offers also a more expensive tier without ads at all, but like other commenters said, I reckon that public is gonna be milked more and more.
I couldn't imagine engaging with any form of media where the possibility of being exposed to an ad exists. I haven't seen an ad in over 20 years now and I can't go back.
Only watch Blu-rays and when I do Youtube, I do it through yt-dlp. If there are ads, I'm out. I just can't physically handle this assault on my mind. It's too much.
I wonder how long technical protection measures will last in the era when everyone has an AI with a spectacular reverse-engineering capability. See the current MIDI piano thread.
At the very basic level you can have the AI spot when ads are playing and mute them for you. Used to be easily done with loudness and various other in-band signals.
Exactly. This (the argument you’re replying to) is basically the same as when some new tech is introduced to the public (e.g. LLMs) and on day one you get hundreds of hot takes on how some company (e.g. Google) is DOOMED. As if they’ll just roll over and die at the first sign of trouble.
It’s like smacking a tennis ball to the other side of the court and immediately thinking you won, completely ignoring there’s a person on the other who’ll just smack it back.
It boggles the mind how people still fall for the promises of these giants about what a wonderful world they’ll create and all the amazing things you’ll be able to do. Whoever was caught off guard by (for example) LLM providers introducing ads hasn’t been paying any attention.
My parents still have a couple, but I think most people's reaction to this is "TiVo still exists?" CableCARDs are going extinct and there are lots of other options to record OTA these days.
Certainly that's my reaction that made me click on this. Hard to believe.
Never used TiVo but I ran a MythTV box for a long time, it was really awesome. But it's been ~15+ years or so haven't used it. Can't believe TiVo still exists.
Not for long. They stopped making hardware a while ago, this feels like the last ditch attempt to find a new business model that works, before it doesn't and what is left of the company is bought and asset stripped (the key remaining asset likely being what data they hold about their customers).
I had their Tivo box until a couple of years ago when the forced an "upgrade". The new box has uch better hardware but the software was a leap backwards.
Regarding ads, on recorded programmes I can fast forward through them. It's not a direct skip but can jump +30 seconds at a time.
When viewing through any of the channel apps most of them used to allow skipping, but over the past few months it's now blocked on all of them I think. They do tell you how many adverts there are in each block and how long the one is, such as "2/10 29 seconds to go". Unfortunately they don't tell you the total length of the break, some sections are just a few seconds.
I'm surprised there's an online component to that. I've never seen such a device in real life but I've always assumed that these have some sort of automatic commercial break recognition and that such features were first introduced way back in the 90s when requiring an internet connection was impractical to say the least.
I've been a heavy user of Tivo from 1999 to a couple years ago when I dropped cable TV. I have never heard of SkipMode. Is it something they just added? because "longest-standing and most popular DVR features" doesn't sound like it was just added.
Never owned a TiVo, but I just looked up what skipmode is, and I thought that was the whole point of a TiVo.
Like, it has always been advertised as record shows and skip commercials. When they said skip commercials in the early 2000s, did they just mean fast forward?
Reads like an onion article. I've gone to great lengths to avoid ads - but it's a war I am losing. Content is now interleaved with ads at the creative stage in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, this inexorable convolution occurs even on formerly alternative spaces. Let me pay, I want to pay, I'll pay a lot, just stay out of my fucking head.
> I've gone to great lengths to avoid ads - but it's a war I am losing. Content is now interleaved with ads at the creative stage...
In the end you'll win this war, maybe not in the way you envisioned but win it you will by avoiding 'content' altogether. There is more than enough to read, listen to, see and do that you don't need 'content' to keep you satisfied. Drop it like the lukewarm turd it is and you'll be better off while they can hide their ads where the sun don't shine.
I agree. Most of the life-changing content I've consumed has been either freely available (in the public domain or online) or a one-time-purchase, ad-free book.
You didn't "consume" that "content", that's newspeak which we'd all be better off without. You read books, listened to music, saw movies, plays, etc. You didn't "consume" them either, they're still there after all? You're not a "content consumer" but a person, an individual who reads, listens, sees, experiences.
I don't like that phrase either, but do you have a direct replacement? Language usage tends toward efficiency, and sometimes I want to speak generally rather than specifically, and so if my options for conveying the idea 'read books and/or listened to music and/or saw plays and/or watched tv and/or ......' are to write that out or to say 'consumed content', I'm probably going to hold my nose and go with the latter, at least once I've heard it enough times for it to feel relatively normal.
edit: actually, and this is just a tangential point, I don't think 'content' covers plays or other live experiences. It's usually screen-based, and the main possible exceptions are things that are almost interchangeable with their screen-mediated forms, like books or magazines.
There's your problem, you rented a terminal managed by the fruit factory so they get to decide who the thing serves. Either "jailbreak" the thing or get a Google-free Android device with an AOSP-derived distribution on it. I have the latter and I don't see any ads.
Windows... same thing. Avoid it if you can and yes, you can unless your employer forces it upon you. In that case see if you can use the LTSP version since that isn't as laden with spy- and adware as the regular versions.
Browsers? Firefox or one of its derivatives help to get rid of ads and other nuisances. I don't see any ads on either mobile or X-top, they don't seem to make it through the combination of network, host and application-level filtering. Those filters just work without needing maintenance, you just need to put them in place.
As to that elevator blasting ads you're more or less on the same situation. The only way to avoid that would be to make sure you manage your own environment. Doing so is much more involving than changing from a fruit phone to something under your own control. I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside where ads just don't seem to thrive, I understand this isn't for everyone but if you're serious in wanting to escape there'll be something similar available in whatever country you call your own.
I'll add that much of the 'content' is very carefully designed to be the canvas for the advertisements. ie: the content reaferms your demographic/cultural afinity and opens you up to suggestions that are attached even oblicquely, rather than persuing an interest of your own that actualy benifits you.
By watching media alone instead of it bieng a group outing you give up even the real cultural reafermation of dragging or bieng drug along by friends where doing the thing together is of more interest than the media, unless on the rare occasion when you get to see something world class that you all take with you.
These glowing slabs, aint that.
Beware, Beware the glare.
Just in case you don't know the SponsorBlock extension can skip past Youtube interleaved ads, promotional items other time wasters. You can pick and choose what you want to skip and in the Youtube Interface you can also press a button to automatically go past a skipped item you wanted to see.
[1]:https://sponsor.ajay.app/
Also hate clickbait title cards? Theres now an extension to remove those as well: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
This SponsorBlock extension also integrates with yt-dlp so downloaded videos can have ads stripped in the final video. That way you don't even have to ever go to youtube itself. The war isn't over yet and people must keep fighting back.
Yeah, I pay for youtube so I don't have to watch ads, but then youtube creators at some point all decided to jump on the bandwagon of interleaving ads into their content. Many are kind enough to make it easy to jump ahead to when the ad is over, but man, I would much prefer they set up a patreon or just let me pay them through youtube's own UI. Incredibly annoying.
I'm surprised YouTube allows it. I'd expect them to want "their" share of the ad money, since creators in a way are side stepping the "normal" ad flow.
It depends on their analysis. Companies are interested in profit and not loyalty or morality. If they have done their analysis and predicted that this decision will bring more profit, good for them.
Intuitively, without any analyses I predict the opposite will happen. But they may have real data supporting their decisions which I do not have.
This is a really good example of how capitalism doesn't work so well in a digital economy.
Normally there is are various arguments about how the subscription pays for the development / invitation. But here we have a feature that's been there for more than a decade, the only innovation is figuring how to monetize it.
Free markets are impossible under capitalism. If wealth is allowed to concentrate there will be some companies that get so powerful they can influence public policy.
At that point you get regulations designed to make competing with them expensive or risky, like DMCA or submarine patents. They also legalize union busting and get courts to declare that you can get fired for any reason and getting pressured to sign an unfair contract is your fault.
The only thing you can really do against it as a government is making sure nobody ever captures a majority of any market and workers have ultimate control over their company. But that system is a form of market socialism so you can't really call it capitalist anymore.
Correct, in a free market the returns reflect the underlying reality and if that reality means that in the capital abundance stage further capital is unnecessary and capital carries maintenance costs, then the return to capital becomes negative.
If capitalism is the pathological obsession that capital should always net a positive return, then it is incompatible with free markets by definition.
I argued this in 2015:
> "...why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in..."
The lesson is you can't pay the danegeld to make a problem go away - the only lasting solution is to get the power and sovereignty to do it yourself. Or as Kipling put it - "But Iron – Cold Iron – is master of them all."
I wound pay not to have TiVo at all.
Here in France, some Internet+television providers have started implementing a new rule : you can't skip commercials on recorded shows.
It was entirely dictated by TV channels, in order to close the obvious "recording loophole" : instead of watching the show in their VOD app, you could record it, and obviously skip all commercials.
Now you can't anymore. There's even a small dialog when you try that tells you that "Due to a specific demand by <TV Channel>, skipping is a disabled feature."
In Switzerland there's another solution: the streaming providers (Sunrise, Teleboy) insert their own ads if you choose to skip the channel ads. To be fair, Teleboy offers also a more expensive tier without ads at all, but like other commenters said, I reckon that public is gonna be milked more and more.
I couldn't imagine engaging with any form of media where the possibility of being exposed to an ad exists. I haven't seen an ad in over 20 years now and I can't go back.
Only watch Blu-rays and when I do Youtube, I do it through yt-dlp. If there are ads, I'm out. I just can't physically handle this assault on my mind. It's too much.
I wonder how long technical protection measures will last in the era when everyone has an AI with a spectacular reverse-engineering capability. See the current MIDI piano thread.
At the very basic level you can have the AI spot when ads are playing and mute them for you. Used to be easily done with loudness and various other in-band signals.
They were saying the same thing about DVR's ability to skip those pesky ads, and look where we are.
When the enshittification hits AI, your AI will magically develop the ability to politely refuse such a request.
You could hack together your own solution (like you can today), but most people won't and that's the point.
Exactly. This (the argument you’re replying to) is basically the same as when some new tech is introduced to the public (e.g. LLMs) and on day one you get hundreds of hot takes on how some company (e.g. Google) is DOOMED. As if they’ll just roll over and die at the first sign of trouble.
It’s like smacking a tennis ball to the other side of the court and immediately thinking you won, completely ignoring there’s a person on the other who’ll just smack it back.
It boggles the mind how people still fall for the promises of these giants about what a wonderful world they’ll create and all the amazing things you’ll be able to do. Whoever was caught off guard by (for example) LLM providers introducing ads hasn’t been paying any attention.
My parents still have a couple, but I think most people's reaction to this is "TiVo still exists?" CableCARDs are going extinct and there are lots of other options to record OTA these days.
> "TiVo still exists?"
Certainly that's my reaction that made me click on this. Hard to believe.
Never used TiVo but I ran a MythTV box for a long time, it was really awesome. But it's been ~15+ years or so haven't used it. Can't believe TiVo still exists.
> TiVo still exists?
Not for long. They stopped making hardware a while ago, this feels like the last ditch attempt to find a new business model that works, before it doesn't and what is left of the company is bought and asset stripped (the key remaining asset likely being what data they hold about their customers).
Virgin Media cable user in the UK here.
I had their Tivo box until a couple of years ago when the forced an "upgrade". The new box has uch better hardware but the software was a leap backwards.
Regarding ads, on recorded programmes I can fast forward through them. It's not a direct skip but can jump +30 seconds at a time.
When viewing through any of the channel apps most of them used to allow skipping, but over the past few months it's now blocked on all of them I think. They do tell you how many adverts there are in each block and how long the one is, such as "2/10 29 seconds to go". Unfortunately they don't tell you the total length of the break, some sections are just a few seconds.
I'm surprised there's an online component to that. I've never seen such a device in real life but I've always assumed that these have some sort of automatic commercial break recognition and that such features were first introduced way back in the 90s when requiring an internet connection was impractical to say the least.
Once again PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN (note this is from 2013, and while its origin is as a shitpost, it's prophetic)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
I've been a heavy user of Tivo from 1999 to a couple years ago when I dropped cable TV. I have never heard of SkipMode. Is it something they just added? because "longest-standing and most popular DVR features" doesn't sound like it was just added.
Never owned a TiVo, but I just looked up what skipmode is, and I thought that was the whole point of a TiVo.
Like, it has always been advertised as record shows and skip commercials. When they said skip commercials in the early 2000s, did they just mean fast forward?
Some commend on Reddit said it was introduced in 2015. I can't verify that.
Reads like an onion article. I've gone to great lengths to avoid ads - but it's a war I am losing. Content is now interleaved with ads at the creative stage in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, this inexorable convolution occurs even on formerly alternative spaces. Let me pay, I want to pay, I'll pay a lot, just stay out of my fucking head.
> I've gone to great lengths to avoid ads - but it's a war I am losing. Content is now interleaved with ads at the creative stage...
In the end you'll win this war, maybe not in the way you envisioned but win it you will by avoiding 'content' altogether. There is more than enough to read, listen to, see and do that you don't need 'content' to keep you satisfied. Drop it like the lukewarm turd it is and you'll be better off while they can hide their ads where the sun don't shine.
Source: living ad- and 'content'-free for decades
I agree. Most of the life-changing content I've consumed has been either freely available (in the public domain or online) or a one-time-purchase, ad-free book.
You didn't "consume" that "content", that's newspeak which we'd all be better off without. You read books, listened to music, saw movies, plays, etc. You didn't "consume" them either, they're still there after all? You're not a "content consumer" but a person, an individual who reads, listens, sees, experiences.
I don't like that phrase either, but do you have a direct replacement? Language usage tends toward efficiency, and sometimes I want to speak generally rather than specifically, and so if my options for conveying the idea 'read books and/or listened to music and/or saw plays and/or watched tv and/or ......' are to write that out or to say 'consumed content', I'm probably going to hold my nose and go with the latter, at least once I've heard it enough times for it to feel relatively normal.
edit: actually, and this is just a tangential point, I don't think 'content' covers plays or other live experiences. It's usually screen-based, and the main possible exceptions are things that are almost interchangeable with their screen-mediated forms, like books or magazines.
must be nice...
On iOS, I see ads for paying for iCloud.
Entering my own apartment, the elevator has ads blasting on the tv.
Wont even start on Windows or web browsers.
> On iOS..
There's your problem, you rented a terminal managed by the fruit factory so they get to decide who the thing serves. Either "jailbreak" the thing or get a Google-free Android device with an AOSP-derived distribution on it. I have the latter and I don't see any ads.
Windows... same thing. Avoid it if you can and yes, you can unless your employer forces it upon you. In that case see if you can use the LTSP version since that isn't as laden with spy- and adware as the regular versions.
Browsers? Firefox or one of its derivatives help to get rid of ads and other nuisances. I don't see any ads on either mobile or X-top, they don't seem to make it through the combination of network, host and application-level filtering. Those filters just work without needing maintenance, you just need to put them in place.
As to that elevator blasting ads you're more or less on the same situation. The only way to avoid that would be to make sure you manage your own environment. Doing so is much more involving than changing from a fruit phone to something under your own control. I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside where ads just don't seem to thrive, I understand this isn't for everyone but if you're serious in wanting to escape there'll be something similar available in whatever country you call your own.
I think back on when I consumed the most "content". It was way back before I worked from home. The peer pressure was a significant part of why.
I agree with you otherwise, though.
I'll add that much of the 'content' is very carefully designed to be the canvas for the advertisements. ie: the content reaferms your demographic/cultural afinity and opens you up to suggestions that are attached even oblicquely, rather than persuing an interest of your own that actualy benifits you. By watching media alone instead of it bieng a group outing you give up even the real cultural reafermation of dragging or bieng drug along by friends where doing the thing together is of more interest than the media, unless on the rare occasion when you get to see something world class that you all take with you. These glowing slabs, aint that. Beware, Beware the glare.
Just in case you don't know the SponsorBlock extension can skip past Youtube interleaved ads, promotional items other time wasters. You can pick and choose what you want to skip and in the Youtube Interface you can also press a button to automatically go past a skipped item you wanted to see. [1]:https://sponsor.ajay.app/
Also hate clickbait title cards? Theres now an extension to remove those as well: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
This SponsorBlock extension also integrates with yt-dlp so downloaded videos can have ads stripped in the final video. That way you don't even have to ever go to youtube itself. The war isn't over yet and people must keep fighting back.
Yeah, I pay for youtube so I don't have to watch ads, but then youtube creators at some point all decided to jump on the bandwagon of interleaving ads into their content. Many are kind enough to make it easy to jump ahead to when the ad is over, but man, I would much prefer they set up a patreon or just let me pay them through youtube's own UI. Incredibly annoying.
I'm surprised YouTube allows it. I'd expect them to want "their" share of the ad money, since creators in a way are side stepping the "normal" ad flow.
The only winning move is not to play.
Only old school media is holding themselves to a standard. No AI, no sponsored content. And thank god we still have a public broadcaster.
The future is unfortunately propaganda and brain rot.
What is keeping you hooked to that type of content?
There’s an easy solution that I’ve taken: just stop watching stuff. Choose not to participate in the bullshit.
Ads are really a cancer of modern society.
Can we please just ban them to yellow pages only? (Where we can watch them on __our__ terms, not __their__ terms)
Shocking! That TiVo still exists.
Stremio + Torrentio + Gluetun
Enshitiffication again.
It depends on their analysis. Companies are interested in profit and not loyalty or morality. If they have done their analysis and predicted that this decision will bring more profit, good for them.
Intuitively, without any analyses I predict the opposite will happen. But they may have real data supporting their decisions which I do not have.
Honestly I thought they disappeared 20 years ago.
The old dvrs were great for old pata hdd that you could individually RMA.
God I’m old.
This is a really good example of how capitalism doesn't work so well in a digital economy. Normally there is are various arguments about how the subscription pays for the development / invitation. But here we have a feature that's been there for more than a decade, the only innovation is figuring how to monetize it.
Isn't this because it's not a free market, e.g. the DMCA and other laws that prevent publishing how to work around digital locks?
Yep. IP is not true "property" either, since it is not "scarce"
Free markets are impossible under capitalism. If wealth is allowed to concentrate there will be some companies that get so powerful they can influence public policy.
At that point you get regulations designed to make competing with them expensive or risky, like DMCA or submarine patents. They also legalize union busting and get courts to declare that you can get fired for any reason and getting pressured to sign an unfair contract is your fault.
The only thing you can really do against it as a government is making sure nobody ever captures a majority of any market and workers have ultimate control over their company. But that system is a form of market socialism so you can't really call it capitalist anymore.
Correct, in a free market the returns reflect the underlying reality and if that reality means that in the capital abundance stage further capital is unnecessary and capital carries maintenance costs, then the return to capital becomes negative.
If capitalism is the pathological obsession that capital should always net a positive return, then it is incompatible with free markets by definition.
can't believe tivo is still around.
They stopped selling new units and lifetime subscriptions about a year ago.
> TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings
Deceptive and false title.
True title is: TiVo Plans to End Free Automatic Commercial Skipping in November, Tests Paid Premium Replacement Service