America Is A Commercial Hell Realm

     We live in a commercial hell realm. Adam Savage said that during the production of Mythbusters that the U.S. increased the amount of commercial time by about 4 minutes in the run of the Mythbusters show. MythBusters ran from 2003 to 2018 and over that 15 years the US broadcast of the Mythbusters was reduced by four additional minutes compared to the Australian version.

     The Dead Internet Theory holds that in 2016 or 2017 the Internet became sterilized and now all content is generated by bots, and all aspects of the Internet are just designed to sell you things. Your job as a human is just to purchase, just to consume. So it doesn't matter if it's on television, or on YouTube, or on Facebook, everything is full of commercials, and everything is designed to sell you things.

     In the last few years YouTube (owned by Google) has increased dramatically the amount of ads that are being forced into videos, and now DirecTV has eliminated slack built up into the previous channel, so that you can't avoid commercials without recording a show to watch later.

     Most areas of the United States did not get Cable TV until around 1980, and others have never gotten it because they're too far out to lay the cable. Before most televisions came with remotes, people used to have to get up and walk over to the television to adjust the volume, or to change the channel. When a commercial came on no one got up to try to change the channel or lower the volume, or anything. No one had any way to avoid the commercials. When I was a kid in Dearborn there was broadcast television with two dials, one for Very High Frequency or VHF and another for Ultra High Frequency or UHF with channels 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC), 7 (ABC), and 9 (CBC) from Canada on VHF, and channels 20, 50, 56 (PBS) and 62 on UHF. If you wanted to watch a lot of static along with your program you could watch channel 32 broadcast up from Toledo. That was it, there were really only 7 or 8 channels on television in the 1970s, and many areas of the country only had five or six stations.

     Television had only arrived in Detroit in 1947 and despite color broadcasts starting in 1954, 20 years later in the 1970s my family still had a black and white television with no remote control because color televisions with remotes were more expensive. Then everything changed. Not only did we get a color television in the mid 1970s, but we were one of the first areas to get cable television in the country so starting around 1980 we got an infrared remote control with our cable box and more than 50 channels. But the remote was the game changer, before the infrared remotes of the 1980s the technology was more expensive and reserved for only the highest end sets.

     For decades they didn't figure out how to coordinate all commercials at the same time, and so you could just change to another channel and watch that for a while, and then change back to your previous channel. Remote controls for televisions and cable boxes even begin to have a button labeled, "last," or, "previous," that allowed you to switch easily between two channels. The only reason this button was on remotes was to avoid commercials. And so for decades you could just use the remote to avoid commercials by switching between two channels, then around 20 years ago they figured out how to coordinate all of the commercials on all channels at the same time so even if you switched between two channels you would still hit commercials. In response the makers of remote controls allowed you to now switch between up to three channels, and you could now include like a PBS channel, or something without commercials.

     Then a few years ago, after 40 years of different cable services we switched to AT&T's wireless DirecTV and fiber optic internet, and a problem arose. With cable if you switched back to another channel the previous channel would have a bar showing that it had all of the content from when you started watching, and it would be paused at where you were last watching so that you were able to stack two channels with content and avoid commercials by fast forwarding through commercials in the recorded content. With DirecTV the remote control still has a button labeled, "last," but if you push it, it treats the last channel as if it was a brand new channel and shows no bar of content built up from when you started watching earlier. Also, if you try to watch something "on demand" like SpongeBob the show will have commercials that cannot be skipped, it literally tells you that fast forward is disabled on your remote while viewing that content.

     Do I hate AT&T? No, one gig fiber optic internet with a wireless router and wireless cable boxes for cheaper than cable wins hands down. I'm just sad that I can no longer watch any live television, instead, they give you unlimited cloud storage of up to 31 episodes of any show with the ability to record up to 15 channels at once, so I just record everything I might want to watch and watch it later from my library. The library expires after 9 months so even that's not perfect, but it's the only way I can avoid commercials with DirecTV. 

     This is not just about avoiding commercials, laws in Great Britain limit the amount of commercials per hour of television to 12 minutes, in the United States that could be as much as 17 minutes, so programs produced in England or Australia have to be edited to remove up to 5 minutes of content when they are shown on American television. This also means the loss of content over time for American programs. In 1990 The Simpsons half hour show averaged 22.5 minutes per episode, by 2018 each episode had been edited down by a minute and a half to only 21 minutes. In an attempt to keep up with streaming services that have no commercials, starting in 2018 Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS and Turner all started to reverse the trend and began adding more content back into the original TV shows and reducing commercial time, with Fox adding 30 seconds back into the Simpsons by 2020.

     However since then YouTube has become incredibly commercial heavy, and I wonder where this will stop. In YouTube's case they offer a subscription premium service where they will just not give you any commercials if you just pay them money. And that appears to be the future. The reason people are switching to premium subscription services is not because they offer better content than cable television or DirecTV, it is simply that when you give them the money they don't give you the commercials.