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Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now).

The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.

The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.

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> But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.

Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?

If a browser doesn't render the web properly, that's the browser's fault, not the web's.

Not really, no. It's the publisher's fault if they targeted the browser in the first place. If they didn't, and it didn't render properly, then it's nobody's fault, just something that happens.

No, you don't WANT to see the web rendered "properly" (with all the ads). The browser+adblocker do the best they can to render the usably rather than "properly". The issue is that it may become impossible to render usably.

This is not enough if we don't stop DRM (which Firefox also supports).

DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem.

Why in the hell would I pay £60 a month and have to watch adverts when I can just get it for free?

Why do I have to subscribe to channels I have no interest in to get the handful I do want?

It's like a baker who pads his bread with sawdust throwing a tantrum when customers start going elsewhere.

SponsorBlock is excellent, too, even gets rid of the multi-minute advertorial segments in the middle of videos.

We had a couple effective strategies to deal with ads on network TV when I was a kid. I've found they they still work today.

1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.

2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).

> If I was watching alone I would have a book with me

That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity

> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show

It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.

For network TV the show producers know ahead of time where the ad breaks will be and structure the story so that they come between acts.

I have noticed when things originally on network television end up on ad-supported streaming services the ad breaks sometimes no longer happen during natural breaks. When those same things end up in syndication on non-streaming cable or OTA channels the ad breaks usually do align with the natural story breaks. I wonder why OTA and cable channels can time things better than streaming services? Are the shows distributed in different formats to the two, and only one includes metadata on when the act breaks occur?

I have no idea why a successor to TiVo never came out. The idea of "fast forwarding" TV ads was way ahead of its time. I've got cable TV and would pay good money for a service like that. The same applies to Podcast ads: I would pay for a podcast player (like Podcast Republic) that could automatically skip ads, and say let people mark ad segments in a podcast so that others could skip them.

Comcast has some support for skipping ads. It doesn't work for everything, just top shows from NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CW, Bravo, HGTV, Discovery, MTV and TLC recorded after January 1, 2019 in HD. It's enabled by default on their X1 DVR boxes.

The way it works is that if you start fast forwarding, it automatically stops and switches to play when you reach the end of a commercial break. You watch normally and when a commercial starts just hit FF a few times (the first hit starts forwarding, subsequent hits switch to faster FF speed).

I dropped cable in the middle of 2020. My recollection was that it also only worked if it had been at least 24 hours since the program originally broadcast, but their documentation [1] does not mention any such limit so perhaps they dropped that limit.

[1] https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/dvr-smart-resume

YouTube is still no where near as bad as commercial TV in the UK. It's when we visit relatives who still watch TV, that I get reminded how bad it is. YouTube has a couple of ads before a video and then a 10 second one every 10 minutes or so - but the ones on the TV go on and on. Probably 5 minutes of them every 20 minutes of TV.

I did so too when I realized its actually worse, its about 19 min play for 30 min 'show' & about 43 for 60mins for most popular shows (you can verify with imdb or 'otherwise'). thats on top of what we pay them monthly.

the other hard rule I have is 'no news from narrated sources' so really no need to cable tv & have cut the cord for more than a decade now.

I seem to remember maybe 5 30sec ads so must be 2.5 minutes.

I even vaguely remember this was lampshaded in Fresh Prince (?)

Uncle Phil is having a heart to heart chat with young Nicky and in the middle says something like "ok nice talk see you in around 2 1/2 minutes" which I thought was hilarious

The youtube app on a phone has reached that level, and pihole doesn't help, so I only watch youtube on a browser with adblock now

YouTube Vanced.

You're welcome.

So, you know, pay for it a little bit? It's there, it makes the ads go away, and it's cheap.

Does it get rid of the inline sponsors too?

We both know it can't. It does the same as using an ad blocker on YouTube. In case of inline ads, right now you can use SponsorBlock.

Yes, when I say "ad blocker" I mean the suite of extensions which make it usable.

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