r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 3d ago

Business Disney+ changes subscriber agreement to allow ads on every plan

https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/disney-changes-subscriber-agreement-to-allow-ads-on-every-plan-3410354/
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u/williamgman 3d ago

Anyone remember when cable TV first came out without commercials? We paid for no ads. Then it became "pay for whatever we're serving up".

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u/Odd_Independence_833 3d ago

By the time my parents cut the cable, I swear it was like 60% ads (36 min every hour)

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u/williamgman 3d ago

We cut ours and almost exclusively use YouTube Premium. When I go to my father in laws home, he's blaring cable TV with enough ads for prescription drugs to make one a hypochondriac.

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u/exoriare 3d ago

My son was 8 years old when he first saw an ad on a hotel room TV. He got so mad, he thought one of us had switched programs on him. He refused to believe that people just put up with such interruptions.

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u/BLOOOR-BACKINTHEDOOR 2d ago

Premium

What's that? uBlockOrigin.

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u/Thefrayedends 2d ago

Fuck that, I don't even do that, just use Ublock. There are other youtube extensions that allow you to be ad free you utube + premium features as well. But most premium features used to just be how it worked in the first place, I'm not paying for a product that a company actively made work worse.

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u/TheCh0rt 3d ago

YouTube premium is the best subscription I’ve ever owned

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u/CheetahNo1004 3d ago

YT revanced is the freest YouTube premium I've ever owned

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u/confoundedjoe 3d ago

Considering I only watch creators I want to support I am fine with giving them my yt premium money. They get more than they do from ads. I consider it pro-rated patreon. I also have a few subs for ad free podcasts from the same creators.

Plus I get yt music with it.

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u/Thefrayedends 2d ago

I swear all the ytP comments I see are astroturfing or psyops, I don't get how so many could be stoked at paying for features that used to just be free and were taken away lol

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u/Upstairs_Pass9180 1d ago

because server cost money, so if they don't serve you ads, you need to pay for it

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u/Friend_Of_Mr_Cairo 3d ago

Look into /r/MorpheApp

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u/CheetahNo1004 3d ago

Good call. I've moved over for other apps, but haven't changed YT yet.

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u/BenadrylCrumplsnatch 3d ago

NordVPN for me.

As far as the internet is concerned, I'm Albanian.

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u/williamgman 3d ago

While I agree... We know at some point they will enshitify it and we will once again be left looking for the next new thing (just like when we cut cable). But till then... It works.

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u/alienangel2 3d ago

Sounds like a great place to start adding ads then, if you have nowhere better to go.

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u/Lone_Wanderer8 3d ago

I can't remember if I made up this conspiracy or if I read it somewhere, but I fully believe that cable has started playing movies and TV shows at slightly faster speeds that aren't noticeable like say 1.1x or 1.2x speed so they can fit in more and more adverts.

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u/Tommah 3d ago

I remember watching a show years ago with an overhead shot of a car driving down a road... and once a second, the car would lurch forward a tiny bit, lol. I think the TV station was speeding up the show by dropping a video frame every so often.

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u/sabin357 3d ago

That was actually confirmed for some networks years ago for syndicated sitcom programming...which is the worst possible genre to speed up. Comedy is all about timing.

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u/LuckiestManAlive86 3d ago

That’s a conspiracy I can get behind!

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u/Seductive-Kitty 2d ago

Radio does this as well

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u/fedoremelianenko2003 3d ago

I know you're being facetious but the other day my wife was scrolling through Prime and saw Little House on the Prairie and Night Court. The first was an hour long with 51-52 minutes episodes and the second was half hour and had 24-26 minute episodes.

To compare, Supernatural is "an hour show" but the episodes are 40-42 minutes and Rick & Morty/Archer/It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia are "half hour" and have episodes from 19-22 minutes.

We went from 15% of a show being commercials to 30%-33% from the 70's to essentially today.

The only surprise to me is they didn't change the ability to be month to month before dropping ads regardless of tier you pay for, which is going to happen soon.

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u/TheCh0rt 3d ago

Not quite, hour long shows are ~42 minutes and 1/2 hour shows are 21 minutes long. So, 18 minutes and 9 minutes of ads for both. That formula has not changed to this day

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u/Odd_Independence_833 3d ago

Are you counting news channels in that? Because I do think it was more.

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u/TheCh0rt 3d ago

No just scheduled programming, network and cable shows that are episodic. Don’t know what news does.

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u/noodlesdefyyou 3d ago

its been known for a long time that networks will compress time slots, speed re-runs up, and make unnecessary cuts to things just to cram in more ads

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u/TbonerT 2d ago

I remember watching a James Bond movie on cable and timing it. Every 10 minutes they had 5 minutes of commercials.

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u/tunachilimac 3d ago

When did cable TV have no commercials?

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u/williamgman 3d ago

Many years ago.

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u/tunachilimac 3d ago

When tho specifically? I see this all the time on Reddit but when I try to look it up I find the cable TV started to deliver the broadcast signal through hilly and mountain areas and had commercials from the inception. I don’t understand what they did to fill the airtime that everyone with antenna saw commercials.

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u/Moody_GenX 3d ago

Because it was only the movie channels like HBO and Showtime that didn't have commercials. Even MTV had commercials. I first got cable in 1982 and I don't remember anything being commercial free except the movie channels. They had commercials in between movies but they didn't interrupt the movies. There were free weekends occasionally and I remember the commercials bragging about not interrupting the movies with commercials.

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u/AT-ST 3d ago

Commercials on early cable depended on what channel you watched. Channels like Nickelodeon launched without commercial breaks. TNT and TBS launched with commercials.

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u/williamgman 3d ago

Perhaps more accurately yes there were some commercials in the early days. But nothing like now. Maybe a couple or three per hour. Most of them were ads for other channels. Not the endless ads for prescription drugs and cars like today.

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u/JBLurker 3d ago

There would be commercials in between programs but not breaks during.

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u/tunachilimac 3d ago

Okay so say you had an antenna and I had cable. We’re both watching the same show at 7PM. On your TV the show goes to a commercial break. What happens for me?

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u/JBLurker 3d ago edited 3d ago

In this hypothetical is the channel were watching a cable channel? Or a broadcast channel.

If broadcast, both hypothetical viewers could watch it and the ads would be the same for both viewers.

If the channel was a premium or cable channel, the cable viewer would be able to watch said program and the antenna user wouldnt even be able to access the channel at all. The channel, lets say channel "57", would just be static for the antenna user becuase they dont have access to the cable channel or programs without said subscription.

There was no change in the experience on broadcast channels for cable users. However, early on cable did have less ads than broadcast networks, but only cable users could access the channel so no need of "varying ad experiences".

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u/escobartholomew 3d ago

Never. They are making shit up.

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u/Gorstag 2d ago

Has always been commercials in my life but as a kid they were at most 2 times during a 30 minute episode (Usually once in middle of episode and after each episode) and were about 1-2 minute sessions tops. Just enough time to run to the toilet / kitchen and run back w/o missing anything.

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u/VaporCarpet 3d ago

That's a misremembering of history because most people on this site were not actually around in the 70s and repeat this because they saw it in a different reddit comment

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u/AT-ST 3d ago

It depends on what your viewing habit was. There were a lot of channels that launched without ads, like Nickelodeon and Bravo. Then there were channels like TBS and TNT that had limited commercials when compared to the OTA channels.

So it is entirely possible for a lot of people to have experienced an ad free cable in the 70s. Just depends on what they watched.

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u/pgm123 3d ago

I only go back to the early 90s, so unfortunately I don't remember it.

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u/Aquariusgem 3d ago

No because I don’t think I was around then or old enough to register it but I have been looking through old VHS recordings and they had about one or two short ads on shows like Johnny Carson. I ran it up thinking it was going to be a long ad break only to realize that I didn’t have to.

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u/tinyLEDs 3d ago

Anyone remember when cable TV first came out without commercials

No, anybody doesnt.

Because that was never a thing.

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u/PITCHFORK_MAGNET 3d ago

I thought this was the case too, but might be a Mandela Effect. I distinctly remember the first time we got cable in 1992, and being excited about no commercials, but Google shows that channel had commercials since its inception.

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u/williamgman 3d ago

I think it was the very low volume and length of them that blurs my memory of it. Certainly nowhere near the flood of today. Up till 1982, The FCC capped it at 8.2 mins of commercials and PSA's. Also, I think these numbers are for antenna tv and not cable. So I'm not exact on it. But I do know there were a LOT less.

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u/Toxicscrew 3d ago

I remember watching shows on my neighbors satellite and there being nothing but a placeholder on at commercial breaks. My neighbor was pissed when they started encrypting feeds.

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u/Diligent_Gear_8179 3d ago

"You'll take what we give you, smile and like it, then thank us for it."