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Comment by TheLoafOfBread | Hacker News Reader

At the start Netflix was about getting rid of ads ridden cable TV so you now you can get competing Disney+ which is now just a cable TV with targeted ads based on your personal data. It is evolving, only backwards.

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At first, cable TV had no ads because it was funded by subscriptions. Then most cable channels slowly started adding more and more ads and demanding higher and higher rates from cable operators to carry their channels. Then the local channels started demanding rates from cable operators to carry their channels that are otherwise available for free over the air. Then eventually they even started showing ads at the movie theater before the movie you paid to see.

What is happening with streaming services adding ads was entirely predictable because the financial incentives of a company that adopts a subscription model are to add ads to the subscription once they think they can get away with it. If they already have ads, the incentive is to add more and more of them until there's pushback (i.e. the NFL has been cutting down on commercial breaks because they got long enough and frequent enough to become a common source of fan complaints when ironically the 2 minute warning was originally added to the rulebook in the early 70s to guarantee TV broadcasters at least one commercial break each half that wasn't because the clock ran out on a quarter).

This is why all of the people who want a subscription based model for online services that are currently free are hopelessly naive. If they get their way, things will get better for a few years and then will eventually end up right back where they are but worse because you'll have to pay for the privilege of watching ads.

I am from Eastern Europe, so I have missed the "cable used to be subscription based without ads" time, so thank you for showing me how history rhymes and that ads in subscription based medium are inevitable.

I think he's talking about the 70s or sometime back then

I looked into this and it’s not true that cable existed without ads.

From a 1981 NYT article

> Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers' monthly subscription fees. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

Only the premium pay extra channels. Similar to today, you could pay to have no ads for some content.

Cable television may not have been conceived of as television without commercial interruption, but it was heavily advertised as being ad free and for a time it really was. I remember the ad creep. It started with channels adverting themselves or shows/movies that would air or replay later on their channel, then came ads for shows airing on other channels, then came the commercials for cars and dish soap.

In 1980 we had Showtime at our house. Standard VHF channels 2-13 that did have ads and one extra premium channel with no ads.

Absolutely. In my area of the Midwest, first it was Channel 100 [0]. Then eventually they launched HBO. Shortly after that there came Cinemax and Showtime. These were all premium channels that showed only movies. (And many of them are still around.) It was a little while before they started having normal crap channels with ads, like WGN [1] and TBS [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_100 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGN-TV [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPCH-TV

Ad free cable may have been US centric and that era didn't last very long. The New York Times had an article in 1981[0] about how cable networks were excited about the potential to start running ads.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

Since many services now split into two tiers with a cheaper option for no ads, maybe ads showing up in no-ads tier won't happen. There really wasn't the possibility to do that before streaming (multiple cable channels I guess could have been done). I pay for ad free YouTube, HBO, and Netflix (although often cancel for awhile when nothing on the service interests me). Ads for other shows on the service at the beginning of shows/movies that I can fast forward through is the most ads I will tolerate.

No such luck. The Hulu no-ad tier still has ads for a select few shoes.

That's due to contract reasons. Hulu keeps a list of shows they are required to show ads on:

https://help.hulu.com/s/article/no-ads-exceptions

Contracts the wrote themselves for themselves. Disney owns Hulu and ABC and ABC owns Grey’s Anatomy.

They aren't being forced to show ads. They chose too.

Shonda Rimes owns Grey's. Take it up with her.

She created it, but doesn't own it. She sold the rights away to ABC/Disney/Hulu

Grey's might have had a contract with an advertiser or other promotional partner that required them to show certain ads during the show.

Yeah, that’s really weird because my spouse and I watched a few seasons of it ad-free on Netflix. I think they had something like 16 seasons available, all ad-free. It seems really odd that the company that produced it couldn’t make it also ad-free.

I think all but Netflix show a preview for another show on the service before the thing I actually want to watch, I count that as an ad.

Market would be a hell of a lot healthier and better for customers if we'd prevent vertical integration of production and distribution, like we (in the US) did with movie theaters until very recently.

It was always acquiring market share and monetizing that market, a better product through technology is just the tool they used initially.

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