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.
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.