I diligently mute them, I’m a freak I cannot stand them. But from the nature of many people’s complaints about ads, it seems like they listen to them and want to retain the words they’ve said?

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 days ago

      same. something like 17 years here.

      Caught some TV a couple months ago at my moms place, and was horrified about the amount of ad breaks and length. I don’t know how anyone can tolerate this

      • zoostation@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        With a DVR you haven’t had to watch a commercial on TV/cable in over 20 years. Streaming is bringing unskippable ads and surveillance. The internet is making things worse, not better.

    • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      I don’t watch it, but I definitely second hand consume it because my parents still watch cable. I don’t really have a choice either since most every night I’m helping cook dinner while my dad watches his nightly reruns of MASH and Emergency (unless it’s something else for a change). The ads aren’t extremely unbearable because they’re aimed at middle-aged to elderly people like my dad, but I don’t care for them.

  • infinite_ass@leminal.space
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    7 days ago

    Visit a house where they have the tv on all the time. Commercials and everything. It’s harsh.

    I jolly roger everything. No commercials.

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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    6 days ago

    I found a cool way of ad-blocking back when I watched TV. Probably does not work anymore, and relies on Teletext page 888 (closed captions, the number varies by country) not being updated during ads.

    1. Mute
    2. Switch to another channel and back to clear Teletext cache
    3. Turn on fullscreen Teletext, any page (I like the 89x test patterns)
    4. Type “888” as the page you want to go to
    5. The TV will now wait for 888 to be broadcast, which only happens after ads and trailers
    6. The program is now running with captions. Disable Teletext and unmute if you want sound instead.
      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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        6 days ago

        It definitely still works in the Czech Republic and Germany. Our pre-2023 president was an avid user. Public TV stations hand-format their own and syndicated news for 39 columns and pick monthly poetry. Commercial stations just automatically jam syndicated news into the format, sometimes overflowing to another subpage just by 1 word, and host huge amounts of banner and fullscreen ads with meh graphics by Teletext standards, mostly for dodgy phone services like tarot and erotic hotlines. They also host “chat24”, probably the worst message board ever: imagine a public IRC room but $0.50 per message (by SMS) including setting your nickname and color.

        Pics: https://imgur.com/a/JF3wN6L

  • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I have not put myself in a position to be forced to watch ads in a very long time. Even when I had normal TV service I was recording shows to a computer that would identify the commercials to automatically skip them when I watched a show. But I guess I’m not anywhere near normal in that regard.

  • LANIK2000@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I don’t watch shit with adds lol. I just recently learned that in the US Netflix, Amazon Prime and the such offer paid subscriptions that still show adds. Like what the actual fuck? Just pirate at that point, the bad sites have an equal share of adds and the good ones have none, it’s a much better experience.

  • Libb@jlai.lu
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    6 days ago

    No TV, no ads. Simple.

    My spouse and I have not been forced to watch a TV-ad since the late 90S. Since the day we got rid of our TV once and for all, when we realized the were expecting us to pay good money to buy a TV set and then still have to watch their ads, and more and more of them? Not the best deal. So thx, but no. 25 years later, we still have to regret it once ;)

  • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    That’s one of the reasons I cut the cord.

    And unsubscribed from Netflix/Prime when they started asking for more money for ads.

    And freak out whenever the weird hacky fix from the depths of Lemmy that kills youtube ads stops working for a day.

    Ads are the goddamn worse, Carpenter had them dead to rights in They Live.

  • Susaga@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    My TV lets me pause live TV, so I pause, leave the room for a bit, come back and fast forward through the ads.

    • jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      DVRs are great. I don’t think they’re really a thing much anymore, I guess because of the declining popularity of FTA TV. Is this a feature that’s built in to your TV or is it a separate DVR? How long have you had it?

        • jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          I’m from Australia, I haven’t seen them for a long time but around the mid 2000s to early 2010s we had products that were like set-top boxes that were variously referred to as PVRs (personal video recorder) and DVRs (digital video recorder). They had digital TV tuners in them and hard drives and would prebuffer paused TV up to a set amount of time allowing you to skip through ads and pause a show as you describe and they usually had more than one TV tuner in them so you could go through the Electronic Program Guide menu and set it to record another show while you watched or recorded a different one. My parents had one and it was great. I guess growing up with Free to Air TV, the novelty and unusualness of consuming media this way and not having to miss the show to get up for tea or not having to suffer the ads and just hitting fast forward still resonates with me even though now the idea of having to watch stuff on a schedule is becoming a weird and alien limitation that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Ironically though now you’d have a tougher time evading the ads in some contexts despite watching almost whatever you want whenever you want.

  • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    My wife normally mutes them, but I generally don’t care enough to pick up the remote and push the mute button. I just tune them out and use it as a chance to grab a snack or go to the bathroom, or just check stuff on my phone.