My earliest memory of adblocking is the VHS recorder or player skipping commercials similar today to SponsorBlock and other autoskipping methods.
I don't know if there were VCRs capable of pausing automatically, based on the symbol.
Some examples — you can see one in the thumbnail for the first video in this playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGD2tjST16V9W8pWMM4bJ...
They were a way for the network to cue the regions for when to insert their regional content. It was not necessarily advertisements. And for programmes that were already regional, there was no need for cues from the network for when to run advertisements.
With digital playout, such things became no longer in-band.
It's the one type of ad/sponsor I can never block or mute, it's just too short/sudden. It's a 5-10 second read. Muting the tv for a whole 3-minute commercial break doesn't bother me.
It's not new. Probably one of the most infamous examples, is why red and white are associated with Santa Claus. That's because they are Coca-Cola's corporate colors, and they heavily advertised and gave away a lot of swag, back at the beginning of last century. If you look at older depictions of Saint Nick, he's usually wearing some green.
I get sick of ads designed to look like copy, and presented inline in stories. That's going to get a lot worse, as LLMs are probably excellent at customising marketing drivel to fit into legit content.
Brand-building is important [to corporations]. Things like what words TV presenters and actors use can be manipulated to reinforce a corporate glossary.
Whenever you see a couple of actors enjoying a beer in a TV show, you'll notice the bottle labels are usually turned away from the camera. If you can see the label, it was generally paid.
I used to work for a famous camera company. I would often see actors using our cameras, but with the name blacked out (sometimes, you could see the electrical tape).
https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and...
Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.
If we are just measuring viewing of an ad as positive, then obnoxious ads will be viewed and thought to be effective. But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative.
Or the alternative, you can track it therefore you assign a disproportionate amount of value to it versus the things that are harder to track.
MPC has the ability to normalize volume in a video automatically.
But not the vast majority of consumers.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.
> But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative
In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
Frankly, if the volume is too high I think the annoyance would be mostly directed towards the entire service playing ads at all, not the maker of the individual ad.
This really just tells me that either I'm an outlier (probably) or advertisers are morons
If I remember something annoyed me with an ad, I will move heaven and earth to avoid their product
I loathe advertising in general and the more intrusive it is the less I want your product. I keep a shit list of particularly irritating brands and go out of my way to avoid them
I have a related anecdote:
Several years ago there was a huge level of competition among brands to position their Bluetooth speakers at retail stores. The stores had a table or a shelf with a large variety of different speakers, companies competed on price, quality and design, created expensive display racks with buttons to demonstrate the quality of different content, paid the stores fees to put up those display-racks, etc.
Then, JBL decided to reduce the component costs for the speaker and put the money into colorful LEDs instead. Not as an end-user feature, but to grab the attention of the customer at the point-of-sale and stand out from all those other speakers.
This completely disrupted the market, and within 2 months they were the number one brand in Bluetooth speakers in low/mid price-segments. Their Audio quality was lower compared to others in the same tier, but they were the most attention-grabbing speakers in every store, creating the most sales.
Lesson for the entire industry: Cut the BOM for audio-components in the speakers and add LEDs!!
Within a few months the entire Bluetooth-Speaker shelf of all retailers was full of speakers with flashing LEDs...
There is evidence that louder ads work: https://news.nd.edu/news/loud-and-clear-high-energy-ads-keep...
This feel unsurprising to me given the long known fact that people tend to rate audio quality based on volume. (It’s what the stereo sales scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was based on.)
I think the difference between you and I is that I think it is always manipulative, and therefore is always very annoying
There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
> There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
That’s a step too far, IMO, and before saying that you should at least reflect on how some advertising somewhere likely benefits you. There are many kinds of advertising. Advertising is not necessarily dishonest. If you work for a for-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a non-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a government agency, your org probably advertises. Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.
We are chatting on the website of a venture capital company. This very forum you’re using is a subtle advertisement, and a significant portion of the chatter here is about how to start a company, including marketing and advertising. The type of ad/marketing that HN is is neither annoying nor manipulative.
If you ever start your own company - and I recommend it - that’s when you learn the fact that advertising is both absolutely necessary and fairly difficult to do well. If you ever do anything in public, announcing it is advertising. The vast majority of companies advertise, as do many government and non-profit and public-interest organizations, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Advertising is a huge part of the business model that funds the arts in the US, and without it, we’d have a lot fewer plays, dancing, and music.
Tension somewhere between the usual ad boundaries? Nothing's happening. Tension near the 7 or 10 minute boundaries (depending on 30 or 60 minute shows)? Something's gonna happen.
It makes TV shows predictable even when watched on an ad-free platform.
What I'm talking about is far less visible, if at all, in adless 60-minute runtime episodes.
Edit: and "what I'm talking about" is clear before-the-ad cliffhangers with after-the-ad "rewards" in the form of events that advance the plot.
Like the PEPSI vending machine, brightly lit up and just happened to be there PERFECTLY working order in the middle of an apocalypse to provide a refreshing Pepsi to Brad Pitt at the tense zombie cat-and-mouse moment in World War Z?
I actively avoid buying things if I keep bumping into their obtrusive ads.
That means Netflix couldn't make any of it's own shows, you wouldn't have each media company with its own streaming service.
Add on top of that standard fees for streaming royalties which were how do I say contract free syndication. As in you don't need to make a deal with a studio, any company can have anything in their streaming library and everybody pays the same fee (maybe with something like a 1 year lockout, but anything made available on one would be required to be available on all).
Then you have a real market for streaming services and productions instead of all of these little monopolies. Consumers get to choose with their wallets instead of tying the art with the corporate policy.
I do. I don’t watch things with ad breaks.
Profit motivated business (i.e. almost all of them) have a fiduciary duty towards the owners or shareholders. They are legally bound to maximize profits at all costs. If they don't do this, the leadership will be found guilty of dereliction of duty and be sanctioned.
Business aren't people, therefore human morality does not apply. Regulations are the only thing that keeps this behaviour in check. It's the nature of the beast unfortunately.
> and yet that doesn't seem to cause a negative outcome for them
It absolutely has a negative outcome for them, there is a post on the front-page of HN right now about how a California law is forcing Netflix and other streaming services to turn down the volume of their ad breaks.
Why did that law not apply to streaming services in the first place? The internet was very much alive and kicking in 2010. Sure, streaming wasn't as prevalent as it is today, but it wouldn't have taken a lot of imagination to see the same problem would become an issue on the internet as well.
For instance, there's a law banning video rental stores from sharing customer records, because it's obviously bad if private entities are allowed to collect and use potentially private information like media consumption habits. But movie streaming? Every detail about every piece of media you read or watch, when you watch, when you pause or bounce, every interaction and speck of attention catalogued and actively used to guide consumer behavior? That's fine actually, totally allowed.
How about copyright? Right of first sale dictates that you can do whatever you want with a purchased copy of some media, short of distributing copies. You can give it away, sell it, lend it out, modify it, make personal copies, whatever. But what about "media but on computer"? That all goes out the window. Oh, you don't own a copy, you just have a non-transferable limited license to view that media on a specific device for as long as the distributor doesn't change their minds. An insane legal fiction that magically nullifies hard-won rights.
On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes". The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bork_tapes#:~:text=On%20Septem...
If anything, the law has given cover to shady walled garden business practices that would not have survived otherwise.
>"thing but on computer"
From a tech layperson, all the tech "innovation" I'm seeing seems to just be old stuff but "online" and therefore not subject to the "old rules".
A prioritization or recommendation algorithm does not count as publication. The work was already published by somebody else. Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.
The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
Why
> The work was already published by somebody else.
This is just wrong. It is literally the platform that does the publishing. However, section 230 says that we won't treat the platform as the publisher.
This is not some logical necessity. It's just a law that we can change.
This suggests they were thinking of linear television. Some searching tells me that in fact this is how it was apparently interpreted, for when it was applied to cable TV it was not applied to on-demand cable programming. It was just applied to the regular cable channels.
With linear TV everything is prepared in advance. When they sell an ad slot they know what program they will be showing at the time. There's plenty of time to match the ad volume to the program volume, which I suspect in 2010 could not be reasonably automated.
With on-demand you don't know what programs the ad will be in until the program actually starts. You could potentially be showing that ad in thousands of different programs at approximately the same time. If the level adjustments could not reasonably be completely automated this may have been impractical.
Not really. There's a lot of live programming. Ad campaigns may be cancelled and replaced close to the time of airing. Local stations and cable systems preempt national ads and insert their own ads at times.
The way this was resolved was not by tuning ads to the content they interrupt, it was by setting standard audio levels for all programming and tuning the ads to fit that standard.
Whatever the product is, they will never have me as a customer.
Even in the show itself, sudden loud bits just send me scrambling for the remote to bring it down to half or even quarter volume.
> a video streaming service that serves consumers residing in the state shall not transmit the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany
I was hoping we'd find a more precise definition. Couldn't this be gamed by editing a short (1 second, for example) segment of the intended content to have loud audio to artificially set the upper bound?
> The Calm Act refers to A/85, and A/85:2013 specifies BS.1770 (specifically referencing BS.1770-1) as the source of its loudness measurement techniques (1770-2 did not exist at the time A/85 was finalized). So BS.1770-1 currently serves as the yardstick by which U.S. television programming will be evaluated for CALM Act compliance.
> BS.1770 recommends the Leq(RLB) measurement algorithm, where Leq(W) the frequency weighted sound level measure, xw is the signal at the output of the weighting filter, xRef is the reference level, and T is the length of the audio sequence.
> The drawback of BS.1770 as originally conceived is that it measures average loudness over the entire length of content. This may be fine if the loudness is fairly consistent over time. If not, a quiet section of content may, as illustrated in Figure 5, bias the average level so that it measures as acceptable despite having some sections that are unacceptably loud.
[1] https://www.telestream.net/pdfs/whitepapers/wp-calm-act-comp...
What stopped that, was that TVs and videotape machines looked for loud content, and used that to trigger ad-skipping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
Might be a "chicken/egg" thing.
i want to mute ads when i am watching espn plus. my current tv is fire tv. i guess i'd have to build a little robot arm that presses mute button on the remote?
The sheer audacity of the industry arguing that it's "technologically too difficult" to match the loudness of an ad to the loudness of the program is an insult to the people who wrote the original CALM Act code ten years ago. They can serve up geo-specific, personalized, real-time ads based on what I ate for dinner last night, but ensuring the audio standard is consistent is where the technology apparently hits a brick wall? Please.
Every time one of those blast-furnace commercials kicks in, it's a perfect encapsulation of how little the streaming platforms respect their paying customers. It’s a deliberate strategy—a final, desperate attempt to shock your brainstem into attention after you've spent an hour in the quiet dynamic range of cinematic dialogue.
I'm not in California, so for now, I'm still relying on my TV's ancient "Night Mode" compressor just to survive the commercial breaks. Hopefully, the rest of the world stops pretending this isn't fixable and applies the same basic standard of decency. Our home theater systems deserve better.
def commercial():
if location.state() != CALIFORNIA: {
volume += 100They exist to ensure things are done right when there's no other incentive to do them right other than "it'd be nice".
BABOOOOOOOOONG!!!!
Instead of and app I use Brave browser. It blocks YouTube ads
Money is an important societal mechanism. It comes with some steep cons however.
I have no real point to this comment.
Best way to avoid advertising when owning a smart TV is to bash your face into to a wall repeatedly until you can non longer perceive anything.
There was a huge crackdown of both such services providers and their users in the EU (ties between politicians and sports broadcasting lobbies), which was immediately followed with increased pricing from every service, from Sky, DAZN, Mediaset Premium etc to on-demand platforms like Prime, Netflix, Disney Plus, etc.
In addition it seems a cartel has followed up: almost every service has added Ads on top of their lower tier, even though users already paid the increased price in service.
Thus all the stuff to haphazardly integrate streaming services. Selling it as a preconfigured kit might be risky.
Too late in my case, between the loud noises and the infantile UX I've long since deleted the app.
There is no vaccine, no cure once you are exposed to content. Your house will be filled with 300,000+ things and it is impossible to find anything, the fastest way to get your stuff is again amazon same day delivery because you don't have the time to rummage through the hundreds of thousands of things!