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Comment by jdofaz | Hacker News Reader

My gym has guideless basic cable on the cardio machines. Anytime I channel surf I would estimate more than 50% of the 70ish channels are running commercials. Same when i stay at a hotel with cable. I’m surprised anyone is still willing pay for this.

Thankfully the new machines at my gym have Netflix.

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Hulu runs ads even on the paid service. You have to pay extra on to remove them. They're fairly long, too, around 60-90 seconds every 15 minutes or so. Something about that really gets under my skin, but I'm honestly surprised it's not more prevalent on other services like Netflix.

I hope that the ease of competition on the Internet will make it so I can continue watching ad free TV. I expect Netflix to start increasing prices and adding advertising, it seems like it's just a matter of time. But I hope that new smaller competitors will pop up and I'll switch to those and watch their second rate programming; at least some of the time.

Netflix already runs (skippable but autoplaying) ads for its own original content between episodes of other things on its service.

I've never seen that, and we watch a lot of shows on Netflix. That sounds awful.

Content exclusivity makes the competitive market really hurt consumers, though. Netflix might stay relatively ad-free as a selling point, but what are you gonna do if Hulu (or one of the dozen other services) steals your favorite show from Netflix while you're halfway through? This has happened to me a couple times now and it's annoying, because I like Netflix, but if I wanna watch certain content I have to watch it on Hulu or whatever because that's the only option.

Point being, the competitive market means there's a strong incentive for services that are noticeably inferior (I'll keep picking on Hulu since they have tons of ads, bad UI, mediocre video quality etc) to license content out from under each other. This is obviously a bad state for the consumer, and clearly the impetus behind streaming services going gangbusters on their own original series, which is at least (mostly?) good for consumers.

I pay to remove ads on hulu and guess what, you still get ads every once and while. Mostly on kids shows for some reason.

> around 60-90 seconds every 15 minutes or so

Fairly long is relative. Compare that to TV where 15 minutes is the duration of ads, not interval between them...

It's annoying, but it's nowhere near as bad as 180 seconds of ads three times in a half hour, which is what you get with broadcast or cable TV.

You really have a TV on each machine at your gym? This is peak America

It is common in pretty much any developed country.

Probably small, couple inches?

Normally I'm there with you, we stuff way too many TV's everywhere as some kind of sign of success & progress. But in the case of the dreadmill, I can understand. Nobody has figured out how to make those livable.

Pretty common. The vendors (Precor, Life Fitness, etc) make modules that are attached to the top of the machine. We had them at my office gym 10 years ago, and that was nothing fancy.

> You really have a TV on each machine at your gym? This is peak America

Some of the gyms in Melbourne Australia have TVs on all the treadmill machines. I am talking about normal gyms not some high end fancy gyms.

I think I’ve seen this in hotel gyms pretty much everywhere I’ve travelled, including Europe and Russia.

That is pretty common, this is the first one I've seen with Netflix and Bluetooth audio

Having ditched satellite TV about 15 years, and relying on Amazon Prime (with only a single ad for another prime show before the video plays, on occasion), or Hulu (limited ads you can pay to get rid of), or Netflix (no ads at all... so far). When I had a chance to be exposed to cable TV recently, I couldn't believe how awful it was. You become desensitized to it, but on top of that, it's constantly been getting worse.

Hulu's ad breaks are significantly shorter than regular TV, and the ads are not 10 times louder than the shows. Ads don't have to be horrible, they're just made that way by design.

The second Netflix try to run ads I'm cancelling and heading back to the great blue seas.

Do you have to have your own netflix to use that or does it use the gym's login?

When I heard Netflix was cracking down on household accounts, I didn't realize they were going to go this far into the weeds ;)

You use your own, you have the option to make an account with precor and tie the streaming services to it so they work on whatever machine you grab.

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