I have such a hate of adverts that I don't have a television. I grew up watching and listening to the BBC, it was a culture shock moving to Holland.
The last time I was on holiday in the US it seemed like the TV shows were just interludes between adverts for expensive brands of anti-depressants and weird painkillers (which turn out to be Paracetamol but for $10 per pack instead of E1).
The movie "Fight Club" has an interesting line just after the narrator moves away from his "normal life" and into the derelict house:
By the end of the first month, I didn't miss TV.
I suspect most people don't understand how subtly addictive TV can be, as it takes at lest that month to break the habit. While I'm not sure if it's part of the same effect, there seems to be something similar for advertising: you don't realize the huge cognitive load it puts on you until you've been away from it for a significant amount of time. Running a firewall isn't free, yet the costs associated with recognizing that something is an ad which should be ignored are often assumed to be trivial.
Agreed. I grew up in a European country where advertising is regulated, you can only have one interruption per movie or TV-show. Breaks are therefore slightly longer (something like 5 minutes), but it means that you can watch a 2 hour movie with only one 5 minute break for ads, and a 5 minute break means that you can actually walk away and do something useful in the mean time.
Moving to the US was such a shock, I can't believe people here just put up with this shit, it is impossible to focus on what you're watching when it's interrupted literally every 5 minutes.
The last time I was on holiday in the US it seemed like the TV shows were just interludes between adverts for expensive brands of anti-depressants and weird painkillers (which turn out to be Paracetamol but for $10 per pack instead of E1).