TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.
It is pretty awesome.
The worst part is that TV ads are a major part of shared culture. People watch many different channels and many different shows, but the large ad campaigns transcend those boundaries. They squat in the shared mind-space and instruct everyone that 'buying your kids junk-food will make you a happy family' (or more insidiously 'your parents should buy you junk-food, because that's what happy, normal families do'). I actually saw one today which discouraged you from asking your friends for help, apparently it's better to pay the company to do repairs than go through all the hassle of having to repay a favour. These sort of campaigns beggar belief, either they are ineffective, or they must surely do serious collateral damage to shared values.
But I think they do do quite a lot of cultural damage.
I don't have the TV on much at all to be honest. I don't understand the people that have it on all of the time, from waking to sleeping. Some people put it on as "background noise" but that doesn't make sense to me - you might as well tune a radio into FM between the stations for background noise or buy a white/pink noise generator and put that on!
It was strange at first for new people, but surprisingly effective.
The downside is that cable subscribers subsidize the handful of TV shows I actually want to watch. Individually, every person who quits makes a rational decision, but when everyone quits we don't get a lot of good shows.
Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
It already is. Netflix is funding a lot of new stuff (House of Cards, Orange is the new Black, lots of standup stuff). Note that this stuff is being received very well by normal consumers and critics alike. They're also funding canceled shows like Arrested Development, Lillyhammer, etc.
Cable companies make (50M subscribers * $100 /month * 12 mo/yr)=60B dollars per year. TV advertising is another $80B /year. Overhead and profit might eat up 20-50% of that, but we're still left with a bill, to create the TV we want to watch, of a few hundred dollars per US man, woman, and child.
Why would people imagine that we can replace that market with a hundred million $8/month netflix subscriptions and not see a decline in the availability of quality programming?
One month I saw the bill and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall.
They run a wire to my house, so that the TV reception is better than an aerial antenna. That's what cable is. That's what cable does.
The internet service was rock solid, but when they bombard me with a constant deluge of ads offering introductory service at $99 dollars a month (for TV, VOIP and internet), every ten minutes, no matter what channel I'm watching, basically, I expect my bill to be $66 dollars for TV and internet only, AT ALL TIMES.
This is the same psychological process where we rationalize to ourselves that $99 is cognitively less than $100, so it must be a reasonable truth that I'm paying a better price than $100, if I'm only paying $99.
If they know who I am, because they know whether to enable my cable signal, based on whether I've paid my bill, and they show ME advertisements on MY TV, stating that I can get 3 things for a price divisible by three ($99), when we both know I'm only buying 2 things from them, then cognitively, we both know I should be paying 2/3 of what their hellish TV jingle blasts into my ears every 10 minutes.
I'm sitting at work, humming their damned jingle to myself, as I suffer through my 9 to 5 drudgery. Then I come home check the mail box. There are two bills. Cable and Gas/Electric. The cable is more. It's $150 dollars. I'm subscribed to two thirds of their products, and I'm humming their incessant jingle to myself about how all three of their products should cost two thirds of what I'm actually paying for the stinking two thirds of what they offer.
The jingle is thus:
EYE! OH! DIGITAL CABLE!
WATCH A LOTTA CHANNELS!
WHENEVER YOU'RE ABLE!
THE PRICE IS NICE!
LET ME PUT IT ON THE TABLE!
ONLY NINETY NINE DOLLARS WHEN YOU SIGN THE LABEL!!!
Smart phones might be a secret government program engineered to earn the complicity of the citizenry, in volunteering to carry tracking devices on our person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So what?! It's still cheaper than cable!
Cable doesn't keep me warm in the winter. They don't do anything essential to my survival. They don't deliver perishable food to my door. Cable TV can burn.
This seems likely, but the idea that it will be cheaper than cable is pretty specious. The reason you can get TV programming so cheap for just the cost of a Roku and Netflix is because hidden in that content is the millions of dollars that already came from traditional TV.
This doesn't seem like an unbridgeable gap to me. And in fact it's in the process of being bridged slowly -- the problem is that existing contractual relationships and infrastructure won't just reform themselves overnight.
With this set up I can watch marathons of whatever TV show I want on various legal streaming sites. Thus providing same background noise you speak of.