5 ms·

Google is ready to fill free streaming TV channels with ads

ggm 2y ago
I miss the old free-to-air days more and more. I could live with VHS quality if I got 30second skip or at least FF of my chosing, not unskippable content. Possibly the sweet spot was G-Code (may have been another name in your economy) where you put a 4 letter code in and it did time and channel for you. (I loved those "would you steal a car" anti-theft artwork overlays which worked when you did FF on tape)
- ssl-3 2y ago
  The old free-to-air days are still with us, aren't they? There's a lot of stuff on broadcast TV still, and plenty of ways to record it (and skip commercials on playback) as well if that's what one wants to do.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    That is also my approach.
  - supportengineer 2y ago
    I would do over-the-air, except I determined I would need an antenna on top of my house, which would be pretty unsightly and would not get approval from my significant other.
    - techdragon 2y ago
      It is wild you do not have this… and it goes to show how cable tv destroyed normal free to air tv so thoroughly that there are houses getting built without even an antenna hidden in the roof space when constructed. In Australia it’s basically impossible to get a house without it having a free to air tv antenna and coax cable through the house to several locations from that antenna… you would basically have to specifically build your own house without it… and doing so even in this day and age would probably hurt your property values at least a little bit even in a rich suburb, and hurt them a LOT anywhere else.
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        Eh. It's pretty typical in the States, and has been for a long time. I've lived in a fair number of real, standalone, single-family homes over the last nearly half-century. Out of all of them: Only two had either an antenna, or a provision for one. One had a crusty old antenna in the attic, but it wasn't wired to anything. It worked once connected, but there was no remaining evidence of any coax or even twin-lead up there at the beginning. The other one had a fairly unimpressive and old tip-up tower outside with no antenna. It took some welding at the top end to get it into a state where an antenna could be fitted -- someone had done some weird stuff to it previously that needed to be undone. It's easy to assume that some other houses I've lived in had antennas at one point, and at least one even had evidence of having had a tower. But none of them did by the time I came to live in them. (And yeah, it is somewhat unfortunate. Antennas are relatively inexpensive, and ATSC provides rather good quality if the signal is decent. It's probably not going to get any better now that even the local cable company is proactively delivering their own TV services in-home via wifi to a small streaming box or a smart TV -- people will just remove whatever coax they might already have.)
  - ggm 2y ago
    A huge amount of content moved behind paywalls. The FTA we have now is not the FTA we used to have.
- phantomathkg 2y ago
  This is basically the answer to free to air linear channel, implemented using streaming technology, DRM and ads.
- toast0 2y ago
  I could live with ads in free streaming content, if the ads are inserted where the content intended them to be rather than 5 seconds before or after the break. And if the ads are the same frame rate, resolution, and hdcp status as the content they're inserted into, so that my tv doesn't have to do the hdcp handshake before and after the ad break.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Free TV is still here: it's called "YouTube". Watch it on FireFox with uBO or a smartTV app like SmartTube and you'll never see an ad.
  - kennyadam 2y ago
    If everyone did that, we'd never see anything again. YouTube Premium is excellent value for money and the only monthly media subscription I actually pay for.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      People have had the ability to use uBO and other blockers for YouTube ads for ages now, yet the vast majority of people either 1) don't use them at all and just suffer with ads or 2) subscribe to premium like you. In my experience, most "normal people" either don't know about ad blockers, or (!) don't care and aren't interested in bothering with them. Frequently, they're too lazy or whatever to bother setting them up (even though it's just a simple installation from the Play Store), and won't do it unless their techie relative does it for them. Even after that, they'll frequently just go back to using MS Edge or whatever that doesn't have an ad-blocker installed, for some inscrutable reason. So, I don't think there's any danger at all of "everyone doing that". If there was, YouTube would be bankrupt now. It's very far from that.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        There's also the possibilty that it resembles stealing too much to block ads to some people
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        Those must be the people who think it's "stealing" to go to the bathroom during a TV commercial break.
laerus 2y ago
time to throw away my smart TV I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
squarefoot 2y ago
Too many products and services, too few pockets willing to buy them, therefore more and more ads to capture people attention and convince them to spend on this or that. Problem is: attention time is finite but products and their ads are not; every minute of ads for product X takes away people's attention from product Y in the same time frame, so it's just a matter of time before product Y makers decide to fight that with -you guessed it- more ads, then product X and others will do the same - rinse, repeat. We better find a new system or we're fucked, as the one we have now literally tries to cure itself using the same poison it's dying from. I have no ideas on how to solve that problem, aside noticing that the trend is potentially catastrophic.
- matthew-molloy 2y ago
  At some point the ad spend will max out.
DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
Everyone is exhilarated about how we innovate stuff (as if that was a good thing in itself, but I digress). Meanwhile it would seem a good part of human ingenuity and money is circumambulating one single topic: where else can I cram in even more ads?
- poikroequ 2y ago
  I feel the same way, but it goes way beyond ads. It seems like there are far too many people out there that actively work to make the world a shittier place. Sure, it makes the corporation more money, but has an overall negative effect on society.
reify 2y ago
Thankfully I dont own a TV I have never considered having a TV part of being autonomous. SMART = Sick Manipulative Ads Repeating Trash
smarm52 2y ago
Ad blocking for SMART TVs: https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/smart-tv-ad-blocker/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/smart-tv-ad-block... https://lifehacker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-on-your-android-tv-1850468423 https://lifehacker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-on-your-andr... https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ Pi Hole > Apps, IMHO.
- vsnf 2y ago
  Pi Hole is nice, I run it as an add-on in my router's OpenWRT install. But it's not useful for my AppleTV.
- hnburnsy 2y ago
  That blocking is great, but the FAST channels will still have ads, this may just stop the targeted ads that Goggle will overlay, just like your cable company which overlays ads on non broadcast channels.
voxadam 2y ago
Thankfully they're still a ways away from devising a way of inserting ads into the content we consume in my house using Jellyfin.
hnburnsy 2y ago
OK. I have YoutubeTV owned by Google and even on this there are frequent moments of Zen in place of ad content. Wonder if they don't have enough ads to sell.

ggm 2y ago

I miss the old free-to-air days more and more. I could live with VHS quality if I got 30second skip or at least FF of my chosing, not unskippable content. Possibly the sweet spot was G-Code (may have been another name in your economy) where you put a 4 letter code in and it did time and channel for you. (I loved those "would you steal a car" anti-theft artwork overlays which worked when you did FF on tape)

ssl-3 2y ago
The old free-to-air days are still with us, aren't they? There's a lot of stuff on broadcast TV still, and plenty of ways to record it (and skip commercials on playback) as well if that's what one wants to do.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  That is also my approach.
- supportengineer 2y ago
  I would do over-the-air, except I determined I would need an antenna on top of my house, which would be pretty unsightly and would not get approval from my significant other.
  - techdragon 2y ago
    It is wild you do not have this… and it goes to show how cable tv destroyed normal free to air tv so thoroughly that there are houses getting built without even an antenna hidden in the roof space when constructed. In Australia it’s basically impossible to get a house without it having a free to air tv antenna and coax cable through the house to several locations from that antenna… you would basically have to specifically build your own house without it… and doing so even in this day and age would probably hurt your property values at least a little bit even in a rich suburb, and hurt them a LOT anywhere else.
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      Eh. It's pretty typical in the States, and has been for a long time. I've lived in a fair number of real, standalone, single-family homes over the last nearly half-century. Out of all of them: Only two had either an antenna, or a provision for one. One had a crusty old antenna in the attic, but it wasn't wired to anything. It worked once connected, but there was no remaining evidence of any coax or even twin-lead up there at the beginning. The other one had a fairly unimpressive and old tip-up tower outside with no antenna. It took some welding at the top end to get it into a state where an antenna could be fitted -- someone had done some weird stuff to it previously that needed to be undone. It's easy to assume that some other houses I've lived in had antennas at one point, and at least one even had evidence of having had a tower. But none of them did by the time I came to live in them. (And yeah, it is somewhat unfortunate. Antennas are relatively inexpensive, and ATSC provides rather good quality if the signal is decent. It's probably not going to get any better now that even the local cable company is proactively delivering their own TV services in-home via wifi to a small streaming box or a smart TV -- people will just remove whatever coax they might already have.)
- ggm 2y ago
  A huge amount of content moved behind paywalls. The FTA we have now is not the FTA we used to have.
phantomathkg 2y ago
This is basically the answer to free to air linear channel, implemented using streaming technology, DRM and ads.
toast0 2y ago
I could live with ads in free streaming content, if the ads are inserted where the content intended them to be rather than 5 seconds before or after the break. And if the ads are the same frame rate, resolution, and hdcp status as the content they're inserted into, so that my tv doesn't have to do the hdcp handshake before and after the ad break.
shiroiushi 2y ago
Free TV is still here: it's called "YouTube". Watch it on FireFox with uBO or a smartTV app like SmartTube and you'll never see an ad.
- kennyadam 2y ago
  If everyone did that, we'd never see anything again. YouTube Premium is excellent value for money and the only monthly media subscription I actually pay for.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    People have had the ability to use uBO and other blockers for YouTube ads for ages now, yet the vast majority of people either 1) don't use them at all and just suffer with ads or 2) subscribe to premium like you. In my experience, most "normal people" either don't know about ad blockers, or (!) don't care and aren't interested in bothering with them. Frequently, they're too lazy or whatever to bother setting them up (even though it's just a simple installation from the Play Store), and won't do it unless their techie relative does it for them. Even after that, they'll frequently just go back to using MS Edge or whatever that doesn't have an ad-blocker installed, for some inscrutable reason. So, I don't think there's any danger at all of "everyone doing that". If there was, YouTube would be bankrupt now. It's very far from that.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      There's also the possibilty that it resembles stealing too much to block ads to some people
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Those must be the people who think it's "stealing" to go to the bathroom during a TV commercial break.

laerus 2y ago

time to throw away my smart TV I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

squarefoot 2y ago

Too many products and services, too few pockets willing to buy them, therefore more and more ads to capture people attention and convince them to spend on this or that. Problem is: attention time is finite but products and their ads are not; every minute of ads for product X takes away people's attention from product Y in the same time frame, so it's just a matter of time before product Y makers decide to fight that with -you guessed it- more ads, then product X and others will do the same - rinse, repeat. We better find a new system or we're fucked, as the one we have now literally tries to cure itself using the same poison it's dying from. I have no ideas on how to solve that problem, aside noticing that the trend is potentially catastrophic.

matthew-molloy 2y ago
At some point the ad spend will max out.

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago

Everyone is exhilarated about how we innovate stuff (as if that was a good thing in itself, but I digress). Meanwhile it would seem a good part of human ingenuity and money is circumambulating one single topic: where else can I cram in even more ads?

poikroequ 2y ago
I feel the same way, but it goes way beyond ads. It seems like there are far too many people out there that actively work to make the world a shittier place. Sure, it makes the corporation more money, but has an overall negative effect on society.

reify 2y ago

Thankfully I dont own a TV I have never considered having a TV part of being autonomous. SMART = Sick Manipulative Ads Repeating Trash

smarm52 2y ago

Ad blocking for SMART TVs: https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/smart-tv-ad-blocker/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/smart-tv-ad-block... https://lifehacker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-on-your-android-tv-1850468423 https://lifehacker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-on-your-andr... https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ Pi Hole > Apps, IMHO.

vsnf 2y ago
Pi Hole is nice, I run it as an add-on in my router's OpenWRT install. But it's not useful for my AppleTV.
hnburnsy 2y ago
That blocking is great, but the FAST channels will still have ads, this may just stop the targeted ads that Goggle will overlay, just like your cable company which overlays ads on non broadcast channels.

voxadam 2y ago

Thankfully they're still a ways away from devising a way of inserting ads into the content we consume in my house using Jellyfin.

hnburnsy 2y ago

OK. I have YoutubeTV owned by Google and even on this there are frequent moments of Zen in place of ad content. Wonder if they don't have enough ads to sell.