Am I the only one getting fed up and feeling completely immersed in advertising everywhere I turn? I’m even confronted with ads blaring at the gas pump as I spend a boatload of money filling up.
I am very tempted to buy a new DVD player, purchase all of the content I want, and restrict myself to watching DVDs 90% of the time. Of course, that assumes that the DVDs don’t contain horrendous amounts of advertising as well.
Even local and national newscasts are filled with advertisements. I’ve noticed that there will be one story and approximately 3 to 4 ads between them on mini news stations.
There has been advertising since the dawn of TV. I don’t have a problem with advertising in principle. My problem is that it has become nearly ubiquitous and infiltrates nearly everything in our lives.
Now, there’s a trend to insert advertising in the hardware itself.
Back in the day, a TV was a TV, a commercial was a commercial, and a computer was a computer. They have now been mixed into an unholy brew by the internet and by opportunistic corporations, which have developed [“automatic content recognition”]
(Your Smart TV Knows What You’re Watching – The Markup) systems. These collect granular data about individual watching habits and log them into databases, which are then used to serve ads or sold to interested parties, such as [politicians]
(Why Politicians Want Your Smart-TV Data). The slow surveillance colonization of everyday electronics was normalized by free internet services, which conditioned people to the mentality that our personal information is the actual cost of doing business: The TVs got cheaper, and now we pay with our data. Not only is this a bad deal; it fundamentally should not apply to hardware and software that people purchase with money. One Roku customer aptly summed up the frustration [recently]
(https://x.com/JeffGrubb/status/1775923997378515215) on X: “We gave up God’s light (cathode rays and phosphorus) for this."
Couldn’t agree more and I think said as much in some thread here about how podcasts, apps, etc are driving me insane with the constant advertising/begging for money (YouTubers are horrible about this since a good number of their videos are because they are getting paid), but people here didn’t seem to agree for the most part.
So many review sites aren’t actual reviews (like The Spruce) or sites (The Wirecutter) cut so many corners at this point and aren’t what they used to be. I am to the point where I trust almost nothing I see online. Amazon reviews are a perfect example, they used to be helpful, now a good portion of them are fake, or the seller influenced the buyer to leave a review.
I figure it’s just because I am old and grumpy though.
You know how HARD is to find a non-internet-capable TV today? Luckily, I found one made by “RCA”, although RCA, the American company of yore is dead now.
I get particularly irritated with ads on paid services, which is part of the bigger gripe that the great TV unbundling we all hoped for has turned out to be exponentially more expensive than all-you-can-eat.
Nope, I’m tired of all the advertisements too. So I record everything and fast forward through the commercials in TV shows and movies. I do the same for news programs. For example, the financial news channel I prefer always list the major stories in the segment on their lower third. So I record the morning shows and scan for the stories I want to watch.
Most national, foreign, and local news sources now post their major stories on YouTube throughout the day. I am a YT premium user so they are all ad-free. And I never read anything online, I find the stories in my RSS feed and clip them to GoodLinks.
If I can’t watch something without commercials I’ll wait until it shows up on someone’s streaming service and subscribe for one month.
When my sister’s kids were younger (teens) I saw their Facebook feeds for some reason. They followed a lot of companies like McDonalds. I asked why, and got a shrug “because I like McDonalds”. Kids.
I do follow some companies on social media, but that is mainly for product updates.
I know this isn’t your point, but in case this helps anyone:
Usually the gas pump advertising screens have two columns of four buttons, one on the left side of the screen and one on the right.
On the right hand side either the second button from the top or the third button from the top will silence the audio. The video is still there, but at least you can turn the audio off.
Just because your TV can connect to the internet doesn’t mean that you have to do it. You can plug in an Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku, etc. and just use the TV as a simple display.
Thanks for confirming! That’s exactly my setup. I put bubble gum in the TVs ethernet receptacle, just in case. I’m thinking of covering the back with aluminum. Can’t hurt!
