Went home to visit my boomer parents for Thanksgiving and they watch a lot of TV. I should say they watch a lot of commercials.
I don't have CATV/SATV or whatever the GenXers and Boomers are consuming these days. I stream everything through a browser with adblock so I never see a commerical.
My god! It's commercial after commercial after commericial for seemingly the majority of the program. Even football games are all commercials now. Do they pause the game for 5 minute commercial breaks? I used to play college football. I don't remember putting the game on hold for 5-10 minute commercial breaks.
Modern television in unwatchable. It's like 1 minutes of show and then 3-5 minutes of commericals. It didn't used to be like this. In a 30 minute block, there was 22-24 minutes of show, now it's like 10-15 minutes of show and the rest is commercials. Modern TV is unwatchable! I burst a blood vessle in my eyeball in anger.
The next day we all sat down for breakfast with the TV on, of course, and we all finished our meals before the commercial break ended. WTF, DUDE!!?
Anyways, I'm trying to get them to cut the cable.
And every commercial is bizarro world woke fest nonsense too. I also experience this at my parents’ house.
And it's all pharma ads. Like 50-75% of every ad break is goddamn pharma ads for ailments that you never even knew existed, yet are somehow prevalent enough to warrant an ad spend during prime viewing hours.
I once saw an ad that listed, I shit you not, "heart attack, stroke, sudden death, and thoughts of suicide" as side effects. Like goddamn, four different ways it can kill you?
And it was for something that was only a mild inconvenience, like acne or hair loss, I'll bet.
take this heart medicine. side effects include heart attack.
They know their audience. No one under the age of 50 uses that terrible medium on a regular basis. I watched the History Channel as a teen (back it was good and not reality TV slop) and the 3 most common ad categories were hair transplants, home improvement, and boner pills. They obviously knew that their main audience was men aged 50+. These days I imagine it's the same with the addition of pharma crap.
It's not prevalence. No one alive has ever seen market forces in action. Those ads are token transactions to legitimize pharma companies buying television stations.
Big Pharma is buying influence more than selling drugs.
That or drugs.
And my parents just sit there and absorb them like nothing is wrong. I think they derive comfort from the commercials.
Sailing the high seas has never been more justified, nor more necessary.
I run adblock in my browser, and run a pi-hole on my network. I don't see ads, anywhere, at all. I don't even get malware sites, mostly.
My boomer mom is just like your parents, has the TV going all the time, mostly on Fox. It drives me bonkers.
Television is a form of company. It makes noise and you see and hear people. Many older people experience forms of loneliness. (A lot of young people do, as well.)
Pretty sure it has always been like this but you've been unplugged for so long, you're able to see how bad it truly is.
Nah, that would be too obvious. It's always been bad and it gradually and continually gets worse. Originally, cable TV didn't even have ads, which was a big selling point to get people buying it, it was funded entirely by subscriptions. It's like boiling a frog with intrusive marketing.
Hey, watch it with the genX slander. I haven't had cable in more than 16-17 years at this point!
College football timeouts. Yes, they've ruined the gameday experience too. There's a special TV timeout ref who walks onto the field during the TV breaks. I haven't been to a college football game in probably 10 years because between parking, security lines, a multitude of timeouts, traffic, etc., it's a good 5+ hour affair.
And yet, sports ratings are great, college sports are rolling in NIL money and ESPN revenue, and consumers just keep on consuming.
FML.
There's a line where people above a certain age absolutely must have access to some form of broadcast cable news that stays on for at least 8 hours per day and the TV companies know that once that demographic dies off, they're done for.
That's why local cable companies are selling fiber to the home and cell service now, they're becoming more like ISPs than cable companies. Once enough boomers die to make it a money pit, they'll simply EOS cable TV and landline phones.
Most of what I watch is recorded on DVR so I can fast forward. The free streaming apps like Tubi have a lot of older content I watch so I don’t mind the ads. I just read during the ads. I miss entertaining commercials firm years back. Like to this day I don’t buy salsa that was made in New York City or I love pretending to be in a Mentos commercial
Cable stopped being a near guarantee in every household. That means to keep their line going up, they had to increase the amount of commercials as it was one of the few sources of guaranteed funding.
Its the inevitable end point of every outdated technology. Trying to wring every penny from its last remaining consumer base before it finally is forced to give up. And in the case of cable, it has about an entire generation still fully addicted who'll never truly give it up, so they can just exist in this unthinkable state for way longer than they should.
And yes, a lot of modern shows made for TV use the 12~ minute episode formula these days and then run for like an hour with 3-4 episodes tossed in.
I just got my mother to cut cable but I had to replace it by combining a streaming service and an antenna for local channels so she can still access her slop, ads and all. I think people over a certain age are permanently bound to that particular medium of content delivery. At least she's not giving that predatory cable company hundreds of dollars per month anymore.
I leave my TV on the Little House On The Prairie channel when I go places for the dog. He was getting too uppity when it was left on the documentaries
Set up a media server for your parents
Haven't owned a TV in years, certainly not paying my loisence to the bbc either.
Commercials are full of niggers & half nigger couples.
Clearly you've forgotten about infomercials and weekend golf. There's always been a lot of crap with television.
In most situations commercials were one of the smallest of inconveniences for me. Channel surf during commercials, or use it as an opportunity for a bathroom break, swap between watching a show and playing a PC game, or swap between two different shows if the commercial timing lines up.
Probably a bit more inconvenient with multiple viewers in the room though, I'll grant you. And more annoying in modern decaying television is just how often things are full on auto-censored by a network, even if the content doesn't go beyond PG-13 levels.
Ehhh, yeah it's not as straight forward as it used to be, I'll agree. Reminds me that I should probably remove half of the channels on my TV anyway.
And show swapping isn't as easy either sometimes since a lot of newer TV remotes don't even support manually entering the channel number or things like "return to last channel".
I sometimes luck out if there's a few channels close together with shows I'm interested in.
And I have to go online to see my tv lineup. Oh and with HD we now have 2-3 OF THE SAME CHANNEL.
I haven't watched TV since the early oughts. I can't even imagine what it's be like these days. Even if it were ad free, the content would be dogshit.
I noticed last weekend I was with my dad and he watches a lot of older shows, as do I really. We were watching a free channel he doesn't usually watch with some old show from the 60s on it that comes in on an antenna. The show ended at something like 10 after the hour which seemed odd, so we looked and realized that each show is in a 40 minute slot. These are old shows of 20-something mins in length intended for a 30 min slot and they are showing them on this channel in 40-minute slots to fit in more advertising.
I can complain a bit less because it's free, but the streaming services want you to pay for this experience of random ad breaks of random length decided by an algorithm.
If you think the commercials are bad, you should see the programming!
The NFL product is proof that sports watching only works for addictive behavior. It's an addiction I personally struggle with. The NFL is by almost every metric a terrible product. It has a ton of commercials. If you start and stop a stopwatch during actual play you only get 9 minutes of actual game play in a scheduled 3 hour game. And the last few seasons they keep changing rules to make the game more enjoyable for women.
my grandma loves her judge judy
5 minutes, commercial, 3 minutes, commercial.
In their defense, streaming sucks dick. I haven’t seen a stream that isn’t plagued by lagginess and / or bouts of shitty resolution. Pharma ads are a necessary evil in exchange for avoiding that.
Or you can just pirate like a normal person and get the best experience for free without supporting those who hate us...
There's no excuse for someone posting on this board not to pirate. It's impossible to get normies to pirate, especially the older ones because it requires a tiny amount of tech knowledge and they want their shit to just work. It's the only reason predatory cable companies are still in business.
Nothing worth pirating.
What if we are new to the pirating world? What is the best sites, what to watch out for, etc?
just install qbittorent and setup/use it's search function.
you can also start looking into setting up a htpc with sonarr etc. to automate the process and get a frontend like kodi on your tv.
i stil use the good old combo of libreelec on a raspberry pi, and another raspberry with external drives as cheap homeserver/weatherstation.
edit. also on libreelec use the moonlight/sunshine combo to stream your pc, not steamlink. steamlink sucks in comparison
In my experience, pirated streams suck dick even worse than official streams. Maybe my old age, but if someone can point me to a place where I can find streams that aren’t laggy as fuck / potato quality, I’d be very happy to do that.
It's because browsers don't buffer video like they used to. In a fine example of fixing what isn't broken and adding a 'feature' nobody asked for, they made it more "efficient" and now you can't pause at the beginning and do something else while your show buffers, then enjoy uninterrupted viewing. There's probably browser plug-ins to buffer the old way.
If I had to guess, they've probably been adjusting their default buffering parameters to factor in a wider range of devices and their more limited memory capacities.
And/or possibly to somehow reduce network strain.
But yes, there are some browser plugins like you suggested. I don't know how well they work on paywalled streaming services though.
I'm referring to what BeefyBelisarius mentioned with addons that allow you to properly prebuffer larger amounts of a video. I've used one that seems to work (forgot the name), but I've not tested it on sites like Netflix.
Download a "file" which contains the media. The "file" resides on your device and you can play it whenever you want.
Spare me the condescension. There’s plenty of content that is best viewed live. Not everything is weeb shit or whatever the fuck you’re into.
You never mentioned sports in any of your comments. There were two possibilities:
I apologize for giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Edit:
Sorry. I missed that the first time. My mistake. Good luck. I hope Tyrone scores all the points.
Ahh, predictable. Some of us actually weigh less than 400 lbs and played sports and have some appreciation for the athleticism that’s involved in this stuff, and we can tune out the surrounding cuckoldry. I’m sorry (sincerely) if you got bullied by braindead jocks for liking anime or whatever, but stop being retarded.
Anyway, the op explicitly mentions sports, so I kind of figured you could put two and two together.
Then just tune out with the endless ads for pills for crippling dry mouth or whatever too.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I didn't get bullied by anyone. I just don't get why anyone would cling to leagues where they obviously despise their fans. I'm not criticizing you for enjoying sports. I'm criticizing you for caring about professional [televised] sports in 2025. Yeah, you can pirate to avoid supporting them but at the end of the day, it's still caring enough to tune in to see if some guy who hates America can run it to the "Stop Hate end zone, presented by MasterCard." It's not the underlying sport that's the problem, it's the show.
Fair. I was responding to comments without re-reading the OP.
Again, why are you streaming rather than downloading and running after its complete?
I’m mostly watching live sporting events, rather than pre-recorded content.
You’ll be happy to know TV existed just fine before pharma commercials.