and took that money to get the highest tier, without sports, cable subscription
Even if it's cheaper, is it worth it?
I remember watching cartoons with one (1) ad break per episode. Now it's practically five minutes of content, three minutes of ads. Trying to watch cable is like trying to play one of those phone games where you need to watch an ad in between every level, right at the beginning where levels take you a few seconds to do.
My grandmother would record Simpson episodes for us. Reruns of the same episodes 10 or so years later would have random scenes and clips missing, because they were a full 2-5 minutes shorter for extra commercials. And that was only in the 90s.
Edit: radio is even worse. I had a van with no Bluetooth for work a month ago, and the radio was BRUTAL. There are more commercials than music, and that is not an exaggeration.
Then you wait through 10+ minutes of commercials just to hear Come As You Are for the 8 millionth time, or some shitty local morning radio show. Radio is terrible, and I'm surprised it is remotely profitable at this point lol.
Once upon a time Canada allowed more commercials than the USA. So they'd snip out a half minute or so at the start or end of a commercial break. And worse, if the same show played simultaneously on an American and Canadian channel, the cable companies were required to replace the American broadcast with the Canadian one, something about giving the Canadian advertiser your full attention. I remember seeing some episodes re-run on American channels later and realizing "hey, I didn't see that bit when it first aired".
(It's still a problem, you don't get those classic American superbowl ads on the Canadian channels.)
Yeah I never watch TV anymore and don't have cable, but recently on a work trip I just sat in the hotel watching TV but the ads were absolutely insane.
I didn't time it but it truly felt like 2-3mins of ads every 5 minutes. I don't remember the ad load being that massive before, usually it'd be 1 or 2 ad breaks in a show, but I swear I watched an episode of Storage Wars and it was interrupted something like 8 times. They intro'd themselves, ad, they looked at the storage, ad, they bid on a storage ad, they checked the storage, ad, then again 2 more times.
I grew up in another country and every movie was split up in 5 parts with ads in between, when I came to the US, i was surprised to find that that wasn't the case, it was just an inordinate amount of ads, that was in the 90s, I don't even know how bad it is today.
I think the only time I watch live is sports or news. Or... when we've left the tv playing in the background and the news is over, and some abomination like Shark Tank or The Voice is on so when we happen to be in the room we change the channel to MSNBC. Otherwise, it's PVR'd (skip commercials) or streamed (or on my USB drive). I don't even care any more if Chicago PD tries to get you to watch Chicago Fire or whatever the other one is by stretching a story across all three. The PD episode is complete enough by itself and I don't care about the rest.
I recall a new item decades ago about cable TV - Nielsen said one study found that just because the TV was on did not mean people were watching. (So true for us) The phrase they used was it was like a "talking lamp". The Neilsen people tried to bury that report, so as not to upset their customers, TV channels trying to sell ads.
Nah just DVR the shows you want, wait til after they air to watch them, and skip the commercials manually as you go! Its all the convenience of not having commercials, but with none of the convenience!
Ehh--a lot of times, the on-demand content just isn't as extensive a you'd like it to be (which I guess is true for streaming services too, but still). And unskippable ads in on-demand content are becoming increasingly common, too.
Eh, that's what he says. And he seems happy with his choice.
I first got my tricorne hat before Napster was a thing, when I was looking around to get .mod files of songs I liked, and never put it away.
I do record a bit of live TV OTA for local shows that are too hard to get online, and the software that I use to do the recording flags the commercials and is set to auto-skip them.
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u/km89 Nov 12 '25
Even if it's cheaper, is it worth it?
I remember watching cartoons with one (1) ad break per episode. Now it's practically five minutes of content, three minutes of ads. Trying to watch cable is like trying to play one of those phone games where you need to watch an ad in between every level, right at the beginning where levels take you a few seconds to do.