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My Amazon TV Now Unmutes Itself During Prime Video Commercial Breaks
- cowboylowrez 2y agothats amazing, we've finally arrived at our destination, "shittopia"
- Dansvidania 2y agoI wish we had arrived.. I think we are just getting on the way
- JKCalhoun 2y agoAll the stops for some time have been for Shittopia. You can loiter a bit more though if you like, it looks like there will be plenty more stops for Shittopia. (We might in fact be on the Shittopia Line.)
- afandian 2y agoSpotify paused its adverts if you muted or turned the volume down back at least a decade ago.
- madmulita 2y agoWhat do you mean "My TV"?
- xattt 2y agoSame way that people refer to a house under mortgage as “their” home. Edit: How about a rental in a building with ads in the elevators?
- JJMcJ 2y agoThey do own the house. The mortgage holder has a security interest in the property.
- readthenotes1 2y agoYour idea of ownership is simplistic. Around me, the local government owns the home as can be easily found out if you don't pay your annual rent called "property tax". Even if you are not a homeower, you still are not free and clear...
- baseballdork 2y agoI would say that _your_ idea of ownership is simplistic. You seem to be implying that ownership is only possible if you can own something in perpetuity without any related responsibilities. It's the same idea as "taxation is theft" and other libertarian nonsense.
- valbaca 2y ago> and other libertarian nonsense Hacker News subtitle
- readthenotes1 2y agoI'm not a libertarian by any means, nor do I think of tax as theft. But if someone can legitimately take away property because you don't pay them, I don't think it's yours.
- baseballdork 2y agoWhich is why that’s an extremely simplistic view. It’s literally the simplest possible idea of ownership.
- readthenotes1 2y agoWell, it's certainly less simplistic than "I claim I own it therefore I do"
- baseballdork 2y ago
- deskr 2y agoYou mortgage your TV?
- ta1243 2y agoin the UK people used to rent TVs, a company called "Radio Rentals", and in the days when TVs were unreliable it made sense - you paid a fixed amount per month and got a working TV in return. A service like any other. That was more akin to renting a house though, rather than borrowing money to buy a house.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoMy stepfather did this and paid for his ancient TV many, many times over. You'll do this with a mortgage too, of course, but to a much lesser degree.
- ta1243 2y agoNot really with a mortgage, as you're not looking at the fact $1 today is more valuable than $1 tomorrow.
- ta1243 2y agoVery very different, and something which lets the advertising industry of the hook
- lolAZtv 2y ago[flagged]
- jsiepkes 2y agoWhile I fully believe Amazon to be capable of making such an atrocious product it could also be that the "mute" function is broken in it's entirety (i.e. unmuting after a couple of seconds). The person just hasn't noticed because they only use the mute function during commercials.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoLike all the worst reddit threads, the person who posted it does not seem to have engaged with it at all. I cannot find a follow-up comment from them. That suggest to me that they are overplaying the issue.
- jsheard 2y agoAnother step closer to that one Sony patent being realized: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
- jasonjayr 2y ago> PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- diego898 2y agoIn case someone else didn't know where this was from, like myself - it's a green-text from ~12 years ago: [1]: https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF
- drawkward 2y agoAdvertising is a virus. It will take over all ecosystems.
- arresin 2y agoIf it wasn’t effective it would go away. Enough people out there are actually clicking on these things to be profitable. Who are they? I’ve literally never clicked on an ad in my life. I’m pretty sure no one I know has also (I hope) so who are these people clicking and paying.
- ryanianian 2y agoEven if you don't click it, you still receive the message. A big part of marketing is repeating the same thing over and over again in multiple forms so it sticks with you long enough to inform a purchasing decision.
- ta1243 2y agoI have so many things lodged in my brain from TV adverts in the 1990s, I'm confident that I make purchasing decisions skewed by those. Ultimately in a fight between a trillion dollar brainwasher and me, I'm going to lose.
- 93po 2y agogo ask anyone who uses tiktok or instagram regularly, literally everyone woman/femme person i know who uses either platform has bought stuff off of it before
- beepboopboop 2y agoI don’t think OP is saying it’s not effective. It can be a virus and effective. The point is more about the consequences.
- drawkward 2y agoAs someone who worked in the ad measurement space for over 15 years: we have no idea what is effective. Advertising measurement is a morass of misaligned incentives. The marketers at a company that buys advertising do not get their bonuses because of effective, accurate ad measurement. They get their bonuses because their advsrtising "worked". How do they know it worked? By hiring a third party wo uses statistics to estimate an almost entirely unobservable thing: how many widgets were bought that would not have been bought in the absence of advertising. Well guess what, there are many vendors that offer these "measurement" services, and when you debut a provably more accurate measurement methodology than your prior one, but the results are lower than the less accurate one? You lose business to companies that give better (i.e., higher) results. This is easily solvable: ad measurement should be accountable to the CFO and not the CMO. The CFO cares if advertising wastes money; the CMO gets their bonus if the advertising "worked". A few years ago, Freakonomics Radio [1, 2] had a very good 2-part overview of recent ad research done by the University of Chicago [3] and other academics. Their research, which is divorced from the same misaligned incentives I cited above found that ad effectiveness is vastly overstated. At that year's advertising research industry conferences, where some of the academics were invited to speak, they were pilloried by the research heads at some of the biggest people in the ad research industry. It's all super fucked. [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w... [2] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w... [3] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising-has-been-overstated https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising... I'll add a little more: the vast majority of statistical tools used in ad measurement are basic basic things that have zero hope of extracting causal relationships between ad exposure and behavior. Even many of the more advanced tools have issues with the fact that advertising is usually targeted in one way or another, thereby creating a bias in your test group. Add to that the fact tbat advertisers commonly time their ad spending with times of peak seasonality or big sales, thereby creating all kinds of endogeneity problems gor a would be statistical researcher. Third, consider the walled gardens: so much advertising happens in them that it is nearly impossible to get a full view of whether your control group is truly unexpsoed to advertising. Fourth, there are vast difficulties in linking online behavior to brick-and-mortar purchase outcomes. Finally, consider the notion that the advertisements qnd advertised products themselves change quite frequently: the results of one ad study are not necessarily applicable to future behavior. As i said: we really have no idea beyond very basic notions what truly works and what doesn't. Some advertising very likely works; others very likely dont.
- modwilliam 2y agoWould be good to know if this is actually true. From a comment in the thread: > Assuming that you tested that this happening only during commercials. When you google the issue, it seems like a lot of other people are saying that it unmutes in general after 5 seconds, which matches what happened to you from the video.
- xattt 2y agoWhy would a TV need to unmute itself after 5 seconds?
- cmeacham98 2y agoPresumably it's a bug/defect in the TV. While that is stupid and I would return such a defective product, there's a difference between "my TV's mute is broken" and "my TV specifically unmutes itself during ads".
- doublerabbit 2y agoFor the same reason of Netflix requiring writers to announce what there characters doing. [0] "I'm about to unmute the TV and watch an advert from Amazon" [0] https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-writers-to-have-characters-announce-what-theyre-doing-just-in-case-viewer-is-busy-doing-something-else https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr...
- omnicognate 2y agoIt wouldn't, but could do as a result of a bug that has nothing to do with trying to force you to listen to adverts. My Apple TV box, AVR and TV between them sometimes seem to get into a state where the sound is muted and whenever I unmute it, it unmutes and immediately mutes again. I have to reboot the Apple TV box to get the sound to stay on again. So this sort of thing does happen.
- foobarian 2y agoFunny how the bug is not muting the TV during commercials, eh?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoBuying electronics from Amazon means getting ads -- and always in the most obnoxious way possible. I got a Kindle Oasis as a gift /w lockscreen ads, and it's unbelievable how annoying and embarrassing they are, and many are for AI-generated gibberish. And that's a Kindle. Now just imagine living with an Amazon TV...
- jsheard 2y agoNot to excuse the ads, but apparently it's pretty easy to scam their customer support into removing them for free. Just send a support message saying the Kindle belongs to a kid and you're concerned about them seeing inappropriate ads, or something along those lines.
- jsmith99 2y agoNo scam required, if you ask nicely they are usually happy to. Not always, but you could always try again with a different agent.
- JJMcJ 2y agoIf not that, a relatively small fee will remove the ads. I believe it's under $20, one time.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoThanks. That's a good tip. And not even much of a scam: I do have a kid who uses the device, and they do push ads for vaguely pornographic romance novels. (Though I've never read a romance novel in my life...)
- SoftTalker 2y agoThey'll probably come back when the next update is pushed. That would be my bet, anyway.
- ta1243 2y agoOr just buy the non advert infected one.
- 2y ago
- Molitor5901 2y agoThe slow motion advertising apocalypse is coming. Eventually, the advertisers will realize that it doesn't work and people largely ignore it, the content providers will force you to watch the advertisements to get at the content, which people will hate, and which may inevitably come full circle to paywalls for greater content. Until then, we endeavor to build a better ad blocker.
- matthewmacleod 2y agoProblem is I don’t think that’s actually true.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoThe being forced to watch ads part has already started. Streaming has introduced unskippable ads, which we don't have with cable DVRs. It's naive not to think that will become the norm, they're not going to leave money on the table. They know customers won't leave.
- linsomniac 2y agoProTip: If you download Prime video content and then watch it downloaded, it doesn't have commercials. Not sure if you can do that on their TVs, but seems to work fine on my Android phone and Fire tablet. Note: I haven't tried it for ~3 months, I just stopped watching Prime content. With as easy as this is, it's easier to use other providers that don't do this, and their user experience was already pretty bad. Searching through for something to watch and then finding I have to pay $15 to watch it is so annoying.
- Mindwipe 2y ago> Not sure if you can do that on their TVs You can't.
- ta1243 2y agoProTip: If you cancel prime then you don't see any prime adverts. I love paying for content. I'm not going to support double-dipping.
- linsomniac 2y agoI did the math last year, and with the discount on things I buy from Amazon cancelling Prime would cost me hundreds of dollars per year. So for me, cancelling Prime wouldn't send the signal that I'd want it to. As far as not purchasing from Amazon to being with, nobody else is even close, sadly.
- more_corn 2y agoThe prime discounts are fake. Cost compare to Walmart. Their shipping is also free and fast. I hate Walmart, but I hate them slightly less than Amazon.
- linsomniac 2y agoI have tried that in the recent past and not found that to be the case. There were no obvious wins in the things I get regularly, and quite a lot of things I get on Amazon just aren't available on Walmart, or if they are they are quite hard to find. For example, a recent purchase of "Fresh Roast" decaf whole bean coffee is over 10% more expensive on Walmart ($27.95 vs $24.25). A Milwaukee track saw blade is $58 vs $37. As you say, not that Walmart is better than Amazon, but it would be nice to have some more competition to Amazon.
- mrichman 2y agoPretty soon we'll be seeing McDonald's product placement in the next shitty Lord of the Rings season.
- ryanianian 2y agoFrodo's eating a green-screen-like blob that your TV erases to add in a Big Mac. The car Vin Diesel is driving gets automatically replaced by the 2035 Audi. The actor just mumbles a thing, and the TV replaces it with company names in the actor's voice.
- pryelluw 2y agoMcFrodo has a nice ring to it.
- deergomoo 2y agoI am so, so tired of what technology has become, and it’s far from over yet. At least on the software side I can focus on the small web and applications from independent folks with no intent to abuse. Hardware is much harder. I’m glad I can still disconnect my TV from the network and watch everything through an Apple TV, but I don’t expect that to last forever. A TV that refuses to work without an internet connection or Apple slipping further into “services” and crapping ads everywhere like Amazon and Google are both futures that seem perfectly plausible. I hate it so much.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gausswho 2y agoI'm surprised we haven't seen the "AI-powered" uBlock Origin of video yet. Not blocking by the web request but rather by analyzing the video signal itself. Or even a nice appliance-tier solution. I want to buy an HDMI splitter that when it sees an ad coming through Input 1, switches to Input 2. Switches back to Input 1 when its over. For folks still stuck with cable TV this is Nobel Prize territory.
- nhance 2y agoI've looked multiple times for something like this that I could load onto my nvidia shield, but nothing seems to exist. There is a tool available for chromecast that works very well, but my ideal solution would be an app I can load onto the shield that auto-mutes during ads and un-mutes when the ads are finished. If I didn't already have my hands full with side projects, I'd dig into this on my own time.
- gausswho 2y agoI agree even just an auto mute functionality would go a long way. People used to hack on this stuff decades ago. I suspect it's not as common now because for those who care (said hackers) they already cobble together some ad blockers and pi-holes. But ad delivery has stained so much daily life now they've sweetened the pot for a new generation of, not ad blockers, but... video shields? I might have talked myself into tinkering on this. Curious what tools HN recommends.
- theage 2y agoCan you point me to that chromecast tool or tell how it worked? I'm in the process of releasing a video player with adblocker for live IPTV on android that can definitely auto-mute the whole adbreak for you if you watch the stream in the player (see my previous comment for link). But if you are suggesting a system-wide mute triggered by a dormant app as another live broadcast plays in some official app then that's easier in some respects and harder in others because people need to trust the data is accurate. Once we have enough users sharing accurate adbreak data (powered by accurate software with human corrections) we can offer a system-wide mute for ads in any other app playing those known broadcasts.
- c64d81744074dfa 2y agoVery Black Mirror indeed: "View Obstructed - Resume Viewing". From the episode Fifteen Million Merits.
- magic_smoke_ee 2y agoIf true, yet another reason why I'm glad I ditched Prime Video. I noticed that FireTV Sticks now autoplay ads on launch without an option to disable that. For such setups, I'm likely to replace them with Apple TV (not perfect, but better) that aren't naked ad-delivery platforms like they're trying to copy something from a dystopian sci-fi movie. Also, it wouldn't work on my main setup because it uses a soundbar that's only controllable by an IR remote. I would be willing to bet that it sends an HDMI CEC signal to unmute stereo receiver volume levels too.
- rasz 2y agoSaw a meme yesterday of new Discord feature where it automatically unmutes itself upon detecting sound of a Fart, and then this Amazon TV news drops. Life imitates art.
- apalerwuss 2y agoI tried to replicate this and couldn't. I think this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back for me re: Prime Video if it turns out to be true though.
- johnea 2y agoI'm amazed that any technically proficiet user would EVER buy/connect such a device. Really, it's baffling. I do have a fairly large Samsung TV, but I would NEVER EVER connect it to the internet. HDMI only is the way to go, with your own device driving the interface. I basically use it as a monitor, even when watching video. The trend in life seems to follow the trend in s/w development: there seems to be an effort to maximize external dependancies. This isn't going to end well...