I'm 31 and I find this totally insane! Why would you pay $65/mo for something that has 8 minutes of commercial for every 22 minutes of content? Regular TV is dead to me now that we have streaming services. I'll pay for the content, but don't waste my time trying to make more money by showing me ads. I haven't had a regular TV connection since leaving for college.
Fine by me, and we should bring commercials back to regular tv too. I enjoyed the golden age of streaming as much as anyone else, but I always wondered how streamers were able to replace the huge sums of money from advertisements with just subscription money. Turns out they can't? We'll see, but I don't find advertisements to be as much of a plague as the rest of my generation.
The advertisements are subsidizing a portion of the bill. What portion, I'm not exactly sure. Even if it was a patently false statement and cable companies started showing TV with no commercials (or maybe 10 minutes per hour at the worst), $60 is too steep of a price. There is too much shovelware (or whatever the TV term is) for that price.
I understand that live TV has blocked times for simplicity. That's fine. There is going to be filler to stretch the episode. However, don't stretch the show out for 25 episodes! If you cut the filler, you can have 13 episodes of quality with more shows per year.
The amount of ads on television is mind boggling. If I want to watch a 30 minute show, I don't want it to be an hour long event filled with ads for prescription medication when I already pay money to watch the show.
I dread this scenario and hope an alternative to pay more for television programming is provided. We're down to 45 minutes a day of television right now. Shows consist entirely of Netflix/Amazon Streaming/AppleTV. Forcing ads on us would cause us to drop it all and go back to a movie outing every few weeks.
Besides, ads are all over streaming television but they're in the form of product placements within the content. They're more subtle and don't interrupt the flow of what you are watching.
Just last night I was thinking about how much of my life is wasted watching advertising on TV. 15 minutes is worth more than a few dollars to me.
I was watching a movie on the Roku Channel. Because the channel is free, it's got commercials. The more I watched, the longer the commercials got. At some point I gave up and turned it off. The movie is 132 minutes long and there are 10 stops for commercials. The last commercial was 2 minutes.
I'd rather pay for a subscription than watch commercials and I will definitely not pay for a channel AND watch commercials.
Whereas I agree with the sentiment, I find that nearly all subscription TV (Sky, etc) has 15 minutes of adverts an hour. These include the premium channels, such as Sky films and Sports. I don't see why anyone would pay £60 a month for these channels to play 8 hours of adverts each a day, and then complain about the TV licence cost of £150 a year.
I used to watch cable tv when it was ad free. Then ads came about and I was really baffled why anyone would pay to watch ads. That was the end of cable for me many many years ago.
Also, I’ll never forget the first day I saw and ad in the movie theatre. That was mostly the end of theatres for me except on some occasions.
I've never understood why people dislike the commercials so much.
Most of their half hour (21 minute) shows only contain at most three minutes of commercials spread through the show. At worse you're sitting through a minute break from the show.
People pay $100+ per month and seem to live through tens of minutes of commercials per show.
Plus is about having device and HD access more than anything. I like it as I get far more content from it than I can over the air and I refuse to pay $60-100/month for cable/satellite.
This is the sort of thing I would get yelled at for suggesting in elementary school.
Instead of acting like a small child, I think Google should just stall this in a higher court, or just not give it up at all. Nobody is going to go to jail, and Google has more than enough money to buy whoever they need.
Viacom lost a long time ago. Nobody is interested in traditional television anymore. We want it on-demand online, with comments and minimal advertising. You can sue whoever you want, it's not going to make anyone change the way they think. They can either slowly die, or they can embrace reality.
Have you watched traditional television lately? I made the mistake of doing so; there is about 25 minutes per hour of pure advertising. They play it several dB louder than the program, so you have to constantly play with the volume (I just muted it). Then, you pay $60/month to get it into your house! Why are they surprised that people are going elsewhere for the content? Who want to pay $25/month to watch advertisements!?
Anyway, this lawsuit shows that they are slowly dying. Google's data won't help them with anything other than "hey, people like our content, but yet they won't watch the ads!" They should already know that by now... so I don't see what anyone will gain.
That has always puzzled me - why does pay TV have ads within the programs. I can understand outside the programs to round out to half-hour slots, but handing over money to get shows with ads inside them? I just don't understand why people go for these things.
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