Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room. In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else. The news channels are even worse, where the energy levels of the ads overlap with the news so there's less of a clear boundary between the two.

Re: web ads, they were bad, but then Google came in and showed that they can be non-disruptive as well, their plain text ads took over the online ad market. For a while anyway.

View on HN

Watching live TV is outright painful with the sheer amount of time spent on ads.

I mean, just watching a show on whatever streaming source...a "30 minute" show is typically more like 21:30 to 22:30 long. That means 7:30 to 8:30 of the time is ads. At least 25% of the time.

6 minutes of content, 2 minutes of ads. It's awful, and it feels so much worse when watching a movie. Movies are all about building tension for an hour or more, and that feeling of build-up is just destroyed by ad breaks.

How anybody can stand that is beyond me.

And of course it's not 22 minutes of content and 8 minutes of ads, it's 1 minute of ads played 8 times, because that's more effective at brainwashing you than not buying up all the ad space to prevent anyone else from getting your attention.

And then the ads are designed to be seen one time, so when they get repetitive you start noticing things that you wouldn't care about after one showing but will drive you insane after you see it for the 50th time in a row. An actor flubbed their line and they didn't fix it, a laugh sounds a little awkward, a sound is out of place, all sorts of things that pique your subconscious and you can't tune out.

How many of you can sing an advertising jingle from your childhood decades later? That is clearly a crime against humanity.

VW has this really cute ad for one of their EVs. It was amusing the first few times I saw it. It airs about 20 times per game on MLB.tv, every game. I’ve probably seen that same ad 500 times now.

I own a VW. I like my VW. I will not be buying their EV product. Ever.

>there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room.

I have no idea what you did when TV was still relevant, but when ads came on my family used to either change channel or mute the tv and talk about stuff until the show came back on. You got very good at feeling out how long ad blocks were and switching back at the right time.

Regardless though, there were strict laws on the ads that you could put on TV, the claims you could make, how you could master them (ie sound volume), and in what timeslots.

Based on the scams you endlessly see in YouTube ads, I'm pretty sure they don't bother with any of that.

In the US at least, "Truth in advertising" laws are anything but. They have loopholes you could drive a train through.

Or recording the show/movie and then fast forwarding through ads later. Or as the technology got better, your TiVo could do that automatically.

I only ever watch TV when there's a sporting event on. But every time I've noticed two things:

- Just how many ads there are. And it's not even that there are a bunch of different ads, it's the same 3-4 ads played in a loop.

- The absurd number of drug commercials. The last time I was I was at a friends place to watch a football game we played a drinking came called "ask your doctor". Anytime a drug ad said "ask your doctor is X is right for you", you take a shot. We were all drunk by the end of the game.

I'm assuming you're not watching American football. That has become so much 'the game is filler between the ads' that they stop the live game in the stadium (TV timeout) so as not to annoy people being fed ads watching it on TV.

Maybe that’s why they won’t promote soccer in the US. 2x45 minutes of game separated by only 15 minutes. And I wish the NBA was like F1 where you pay a subscription and you have access to pretty much everything. I don’t mind sponsored labels and name drops.

Don't mean to go off on a rant here...but soccer will always struggle in the US until the refs start aggressively calling simulation aka 'diving' (and maybe changing some penalty kick rules to discourage it) on the Neymar wannabes flopping around and acting like they've been shot by a tazer at the slightest touch. I've played soccer since I was like 10, and I've been a season ticket holder at my local MLS team since they started, so love the game. But I'm often too embarrassed to even bring up soccer with lots of my US based, sports-mad friends because inevitably the conversation devolves into how games turn on eye-roll worthy acting on the field, refs buying into it, and I can't argue they're wrong (esp since I played rugby as well so have little sympathy for "fake ouchies").

And since we're on the topic...soccer also needs to adopt rugby's rule that only the team captain can talk to the ref and question calls, and respect is required. But, you know...baby steps.

Thanks for the detailed explanation why the NBA is obscure in the US.

Read for comprehension, not just look at words and remember the last ones. It helps.

Soccer will always struggle in the US because of culture. Outside of the US, soccer is the sport everyone gathers around the TV to watch, but here in the US that's usually the NFL. If American Football never came to existence and we played soccer like the rest of the world I bet that the US would have dominated and we would have clubs like PSG and Real Madrid. But because we have American Football here, all the money and attention is on that sport and soccer is just a niche sport.

The MLS can do alot to become more popular but it won't ever be what soccer in the rest of the world is because to do that they would have to dethrone American Football which is just never happening.

I had a VCR that auto-skipped commercials 20 years ago.

How did it work? How did it know the difference between an ad and regular tv?

I believe it detected the hard cut between content and commercial. It was honestly flawless as long as I had it.

I wondered how this could reliably distinguish between a scene cut and a cut to commercial without content hashes and/or program schedules being shared through the network, then realized that 20 years ago was already 2003 and of course home internet was common by then.

Apparently one offline technique was checking for black frames inserted by local stations.

Some more information here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV

Speak for yourself, I blocked TV ads since 1999 when I bought a TiVo series 1.

TV here is pure hell now. I turn it on in a hotel periodically and always regret it. There’s plenty to watch but the ads are louder and dumber and have naturally become saturated with insanely high margin / LTV scam products like testosterone pills, the worst pay-to-win game imaginable or literally just gambling.

Same. And then when I go to the homes of people I love, and their TVs are blaring commercials in the background of their lives, it's such this weird "I thought I knew you" feeling.

> Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room.

VCR & fast forward.

> In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else.

The US television ads switched to that format to make them more obnoxious and harder to fast forward over.

This battle between attention spam and users thinking that's obnoxious has been going on for decades.

Back when I still watched cable which was ~14 years ago at my parents' house, I used a TiVo to do so partially because it allowed me to skip ads (the other reason being so I could catch late night programs the next day).

After moving out I never subscribed to cable or satellite and don't watch terrestrial broadcasts either, partially because of the advertising. If I were to subscribe now it'd probably be contingent on my ability to use a modern TiVo-like DVR for the same reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com