Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
People still bought TV's when they were comparatively more expensive (hell we rented them here in the UK). I don't buy this line that "oh if you want a cheap TV...". No, it's an underhand tactic to try and justify adtech's creepy outreach.
when TVs were this expensive you didn't have this technology. Furthermore you had less competition from e.g. Korea and China in the TV sector.
Television is adtech
it definitely started that way, like with radio before it. early programs were directly paid for by advertisers and the adds were right in the middle of the show presented by the hosts! (kinda like how yt does it now sometimes but even more so)

its literally why we call the whole genre of soap operas that. they would all be sponsored by soap and cleaning product companies trying to reach stay at home moms as their target market for the ads.

ads were along for so much of the history of tv... its easy to forget because recently netflix made it seem like we could just directly pay for content as just entertainment (like movies always were).

but those days are gone and we are returning to the roots. i dont think a single streamer doesnt have an ad tier and we are starting to lose the ad free pay more options too (disney, amazon)

That it was ok in the past certainly doesn't mean it's ok now. And TV advertising wasn't as sinister as it is now with targeted ads that require a detailed profile of every viewer. Everyone just got the same ads.

If blocking ads won't be possible anymore then I'll just pirate everything. And jailbreaking TVs and other hardware.

ya agree, a targeted ad is a very different beast, its not so much the targeting thats the issue either. id much rather only see ads for stuff in interested in than stuff i really dont need. its HOW they come up with that targeting. scraping stealing tracking all the other bs that makes that targeted ad feel creepy and gross.

and if you think its not gonna get so much worse with ai able to generate 10x the ad variants... or maybe even personalized ad versions.(one day, probably too expensive now)

good thing its never been easier to hack everything, maybe we can also figure out how to hack the legal system enough to make shady stuff like recording you in your house a felony. i feel like we should start with making it so that terms in a eula cant bind you to take specific actions. inal but in the case of 2p consent states if you go to your friends house and he doesnt tell you that his tv's eula said that it'll be recording all the time then he's in trouble, but the company actually doing the recording.. scott free because they said in the eula it was the responsibility of the owner to tell everyone who comes near the tv it might be recording. ...why would you ever click that agreement that you were forced to click to use the thing that you already bought and setup, what is the actual recourse for not saying yes? go return the tv and pay the restock fee? idk that doesnt sound like a reasonable contract/agreement that should ever be enforcable. which would mean its actually the tv companies doing all the wiretapping in 2p states...

hmm.. i know im wrong in many ways but i can dream that the law could be actually reasonable.