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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

Only if there was an HBO for sports too. I hate watching those stupid ads when I watch live sports!

What would a service like that do during television timeouts?

I’ve found silent “we’ll be right back” screens to almost be worse than ads in some ways. It’s just a weird feeling.

Just treat it like any other timeout that's shown: show the fans, cut to the coaches, cut to the commentators -- call it exclusive content any you're pretty much golden.

You could even have the commentators take a break during tv timeouts, and just have some chill crowd shots. Maybe get some teams on board to show what they'd do on jumbotrons during the breaks in action.

The BBC in the UK airs the Superbowl every year, but the BBC is not allowed to show advertisements.

They show the main feed except when ad-breaks happen, at which point they cut to a studio with a host and a couple of pundits who talk about things related to/that are happening in the game.

Works pretty well. We used to get a VPN on and find a US stream to have a laugh at the absurdity of American advertising but these days the Beeb's coverage is more than fine.

I've always enjoyed those quiet ad-free breaks on MLB.tv. This year they've started filling them with loud , annoying, repetitive ads. Starting to wonder why bother paying for the service.

It does depend on the sport, but for basketball they could replay interesting plays, talk about players, theorize strategy, broadcast in-stadium fillers, or just show the team talking.

I rarely watch sports events live. Each sport has a fairly predictable timeline. For example, an NFL game is about 3.5 hours of clock time for what's an hour long game (skipping clock stoppage and half-time). So just start watching 2.5 hours after kickoff and you catch up with real time by the end of the game.

Overwatch League handles this by displaying the stats from players as it counts down till it comes back from ads. I like that. I know exactly how long I have, and if I don't have to go anywhere, the stats are still pretty interesting.

What do people who are there in person do?

The screen can just show the players milling around, or show the fans, or the announcer can give random factoids.

Scroll tweets from fans.

> Only if there was an HBO for sports too. I hate watching those stupid ads when I watch live sports!

Funny, I came here to comment on my distaste for services, such as hbonow, that throw ads in front of paid content. They place ads for their other shows in front of the thing I’m trying to watch (at least, the web service does). I hate it and I am considering dropping my subscription as a result.

I don't really get this sentiment. I get not wanting to see ads that have nothing to do with the service you're using, but I personally have never been upset or revolted at HBO running their trailers for other shows before the show I want to watch. Everyone has their own tastes and to each their own I just wish I could understand the absolute revolt some people feel at even content relevant ads.

Compare with a service like Netflix. Netflix has no ads and let’s me skip past the opening titles with a single click of a button. It’s highly optimized to give me what I want.

HBO not only shows me ads for unrelated content (it’s really never something I’m interested in seeing), but I have to blindly click the timeline when I skip it. If I overshoot, I have to backtrack in search of the first scene. Overshooting again puts me back in the ad. It’s more about what HBO wants me to see than it is about what I want to see.

During the Winter Olympics, I tried to figure out what I would have paid NBC for an ad-free experience (I watched as much as I could via CBC, but sometimes I just wanted to watch on TV without the VPN rigeramorale). I came up with $300. I would've paid NBC $300 for two weeks of ad-free Olympics coverage.

You think there are 3 or 4 million other households that would set the same price?

(they had $900 million+ in ad revenue)

It'd be a fun gimmick if they could figure out a way to auction ad free broadcasts to their viewers.

Interesting, probably not.

The streaming app was almost rage inducing though. Seeing periodic commercials in and of itself wouldn't be that bad. But NBC seemed to have more ad slots than ads, because I kept seeing the same dumb 3 or 4 ads over and over, and many weren't even relevant. There was a Comcast ad that made no sense to show me. I'm not in a Comcast market.

Worse, you basically couldn't forward through an event since it would stop you at an "ad point" and make you watch that ad. You could then forward to the next "ad point" and have to sit through that one. And if you skipped backwards to re-watch something to earlier than the "ad point", it would show the ads again.

By contrast, CBC basically shows you 90 seconds of ads up front, then lets you watch the rest of the event including skipping around ad free.

The NBC app could have used logic like, for every X minutes of program time you watch, you have to watch Y minutes of ads. That would have been okay. But no, the NBC app was basically "we're going to force you to watch these ads" like that episode of Black Mirror.

And BTW, this was for the paid NBC networks as I had to pickup a Sony Vue account to watch anything not on the main network. For the main network, I recorded everything on my Tablo from OTA where I could skip around as much as I wanted.

Comcast owns NBC so will be a common filler ad on NBC whether it makes sense or not.

If you get the individual league streaming services, they often show "Commercial Break In Progress" across a semi-static image with no audio during ad breaks.

Yeah, that's one thing I really liked about MLB.tv.

It's gone. :(

> Only if there was an HBO for sports too.

There are several. HBO itself is one of them. The sports on them are fairly limited, most notably boxing, however.

I might pay for that if the arena and equipment wasn't also covered in ads. That's never going to change.

Exactly. I think NBA League Pass cuts out the advertising from the local tv networks during timeouts and half time to show the in arena feed (kiss cam, etc). But those are often times ads now as well.

I'm meh on those sponsorships, but would definitely pay for a commercial-removed sports experience.

People don't realize how much dead time is introduced to professional games solely for commercial breaks.

You can ignore a sponsor logo, you can't get that time back.

its called PPV, a showing of an ad-free event. :)

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