> The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what.

yep, I remember when cable tv was ad-free (because who would've dreamt people would be ok with paying a subscription fee while still getting ads shoved down their throat?)

I knew someone who was an early adopter of satellite TV. She said during the news, rather than ads, you saw the hosts smoking and chatting.

That sounds so much more pleasant than what we have today.

When cable had no ads, did all programs just run continously? If a channel did a special where they played standard TV programs designed for over the air broadcast (18-23 minutes/episode), did they just play them consecutively or have some other filler to keep on a 30 or 60 minute schedule?

In the UK, the BBC channels are still ad-free. Shows like The IT Crowd or Star Trek just play through continuously without ads.

Between shows, they have a short ad break advertising other BBC shows and live broadcasts that will be playing at a later time, but nothing paid.

Premium linear channels in the US (think HBO) do this as well. It's an artifact of programming blocks -- you want your movie/show/sport/etc. to start on the hour or half-hour, but the thing before it rarely will end when you want it to (a few seconds of slack time to switch to the next item). If you have some small-enough unit of time left between the end of the movie and the start of the next slot, you either commission a bunch of micro-length shorts or you run internal promos to fill the gap.

I wouldn’t really call the intermission an ad break as they’re not really trying to sell you something. The main purpose is as a buffer between shows with slightly different timings or with live shows that won’t finish at an exact time (or may overrun like sports matches). You get the same on the radio too though they often have a short news briefing in the gap as well. Very occasionally they will have too large a gap to fill and read a poem.

IT Crowd isn't BBC, though...

I think their point is that shows that were produced with ads in mind simply play through with no gaps (similar to how ad-free streaming services play them).

How do they schedule the shows to account for the odd lengths?

> How do they schedule the shows to account for the odd lengths?

Certainly up through the 90s the 'big ticket' and imported shows started on the hour or :30 and everything else slotted around that. Secondary programmes often started at :50 or :15 as a result.

https://www.transdiffusion.org/content/uploads/2016/10/19991...

If timings were really awkward they would pad five or ten minutes with a short filler about hot air ballooning or pottery making or somesuch

Same in Germany with the public TV channels like ARD, ZDF, etc.

With satellite TV in the 90s, some channels simply blacked out or showed a placeholder in the ad slots -- sometimes the satellite channels were the very feeds that the TV stations were using.

Premium channels would fill the gaps between shows with advertisements for upcoming shows on the same channel or affiliated channels. Coming from broadcast TV, networks like HBO were kind of incredible; no ads, just the thing you went there to watch.

By then, however, the non-premium channels definitely carried ads.

At least in my country, in the week just after christmas, in several children cable channels, the ads dissapear. Instead the run "ads" for other shows in the channel.

I guess that how TV without ads would look like.

In Israel, cable/satellite company-owned channels only ads shown for other shows or channels. That's not because they're nice, but because they're legally barred from showing "real" ads (only commercial, free OTA channels can do that; gov-owned public access only shows ads for their own shows, same reason). Plus those ads are just between programs and never in the middle of one. They still get very repetitive, though.

In the USA, the Disney Channel is mostly like this year round.

tcm is like this.

> She said during the news, rather than ads, you saw the hosts smoking and chatting.

Sounds like she was viewing the direct feed or something. There is a documentary called "Spin" which was recorded footage of the downtime between ads. You can see, for example, George H.W. Bush chatting up Larry King. There is footage of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and others. The people being recorded don't seem to realize that the satellite feed continues during a break or downtime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film)

In addition to cable going to ads, it deserves mention that many shows today feature brand advertising right in the program.

I pay for Netflix, but go watch a Korean drama and they are clearly advertising Subway, KFC, Samsung, etc. right there in the show through the show itself.

Movies do this too, and you paid for that expensive ticket. Wayne's World even did a parody of this in 1992:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0

Advertising is incredibly pervasive in our modern society and only going to increase.

cable tv always had ads because the cable subscription goes to an infrastructure provider not the content provider. If the infrastructure provider was the content provider there is a substantial incentive to reduce or eliminate ads a la Netflix and Amazon Prime which largely restrict ads to brief promotions of other content on the network.

I don't believe this is correct. Certain cable television channels were originally ad free (e.g. USA, Nickelodeon) because they competed against free OTA broadcasts which were ad supported.

Similarly to pay per view.

That those channels now show commercials (and has for a long enough time that people think "it was always like this") just cements our expectations that commercials are a fact of life.

Those infrastructure providers pay a ton of money to the content providers. I've heard that ESPN is the single largest cost of most cable plans.

>I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them.

So am I. The problem is that the paying members are also the same members that are most valuable to advertisers (because they have disposable cash and are probably 'power users' of the platform), so there is an incentive to 'sell them' to advertisers as well.

If we get enough global privacy laws with sufficient teeth, it may be possible for paid models to offer a low risk alternative to spying where you would be constantly at risk of fines for poor decisions on how you implement your data collection. It would be quite a change in the way the internet works financially, but it seems like companies would be likely to adapt to it were it to happen.

The trouble with paid social media is that the value is in the network, and becomes much less attractive if lots (maybe 90% of users) don't pay, and hence are removed from the service.

You could do freemium, but you'd make a lot less money (FB would anyway, maybe this would work for Twitter) without reducing your support costs.

So yeah, I'm not sure this would work in the current setup (even global privacy laws with teeth will move from individual level ads to cohort level ads). The trouble is not that subscription services are worse, it's that ads are super profitable if you're a really big service.

> companies [don’t] stop spying just becouse you paid them

I think Windows (10 especially) is Exhibit A here (its “users” are definitely the product, but MS is happy to take their free money — or not, you can download it for $0 from their site, and cheap activation keys are easy to find), and the world’s first trillion dollar company is Exhibit B — its end-users are customers in many senses of the word, and they’re not the product, but a product that they offer to their walled garden’s developers with strings attached.

A derivative take on this is that getting people used to paying for internet services, would enable more respectful platforms that need the subscription revenue, to exist.

I also would never pay for participation in a monolithic user-generated content platform with questionable "curation" (e.g. Youtube Premium), but directly paying for hosting/moderation/admin work is still the way forward IMO.

Correct. I don't understand why people suggest direct revenue streams would help in this regard. Have you seen Facebook's profit margins? They don't need to spy on people.

I think you're right, but if people had to pay even a few dollars a month for Facebook and Twitter I think it would make a big dent in amount of nonstop drivel and shitposting that goes on. And that's another reason it won't happen, it would reduce eyeballs for the ads.

Indeed, and especially if they already have the tracking tech anyway. Why bother turning it off?

I wish that paying for Spotify meant that my privacy would be respected, but I have zero illusions that they basically gather at least as much data as free customers.