Some of us are old enough to remember when the entire point of cable TV was to avoid commercials. Over-the-air antenna TV was supported by ads. But then cable came along, and went “hey, what if we offered a paid TV service, without the ads?”
Then they realized they could just fucking double-dip and show ads anyways. And now they’re charging extra to skip those ads.
And we’ve seen streaming services start to take the same route. Some have started showing ads to paid users, then charging extra to avoid the ads.
Sky TV in the UK charge you to skip commercials, when they put the commercials in the programmes.
Some of us are old enough to remember when the entire point of cable TV was to avoid commercials. Over-the-air antenna TV was supported by ads. But then cable came along, and went “hey, what if we offered a paid TV service, without the ads?”
Then they realized they could just fucking double-dip and show ads anyways. And now they’re charging extra to skip those ads.
And we’ve seen streaming services start to take the same route. Some have started showing ads to paid users, then charging extra to avoid the ads.
Literally every cable and streaming company does that. It’s not the same thing.
Sky TV takes ‘The Last of Us’ from HBO, which has no commercials, puts commercials in it and then charges you if you want to skip those commercials.
Yup. Every cable channel has done that for forty+ years.
Thats not unique or new.
But cable TV like all services when it first came about did not have ads. You paid for cable at first because it had no ads compared to antenna.