Here in France, some Internet+television providers have started implementing a new rule : you can't skip commercials on recorded shows.
It was entirely dictated by TV channels, in order to close the obvious "recording loophole" : instead of watching the show in their VOD app, you could record it, and obviously skip all commercials.
Now you can't anymore. There's even a small dialog when you try that tells you that "Due to a specific demand by <TV Channel>, skipping is a disabled feature."
I don't listen to podcasts with ads, but my wife does, and I was in a car ride with her a couple of weeks ago, and she demonstrated something that I hadn't known about even though it's trivial. Her fast forward button skipped forward 30 seconds, and her rewind button skipped back 10 seconds. So it allowed her to skip forward by 30 second increments until she got to content, and then skip back by 10 seconds until she got to the break. I'm sure this is well known by everyone, but it seems to be a generic enough algorithm that France would have trouble banning it. Is it that France is banning the skip commercial functionality or they're literally preventing video players from skipping forward by 30 seconds? Seems draconian if it's the latter, but then again, I was blown away by how La Liga has been the tail wagging the internet dog lately.
In Switzerland there's another solution: the streaming providers (Sunrise, Teleboy) insert their own ads if you choose to skip the channel ads. To be fair, Teleboy offers also a more expensive tier without ads at all, but like other commenters said, I reckon that public is gonna be milked more and more.
Call up cable tv provuder and say" due to a specific demand by me, i am cancelling my tv service." Then use the time you would have watched tv to lobby to red&ce copyright back to the original 14 years where it probably belonged.
> Here in France, some Internet+television providers have started implementing a new rule : you can't skip commercials on recorded shows.
Wait until you hear of the extended version of this: Some longer whole day live sports on Dutch RTL (and others, it's catching on) have the option for playback but you have to watch from the start and cannot fast forwards in any way. Want to watch the last match? You need to pay more or play several hours of ad ridden TV first!
They are just m3u8 files so extract that, drop it in VLC and you are fine. But 99.9% of the populance will never be able to do that.
I suppose you could walk away to grab a snack or bathroom break during a commercial like in the old days but then I assume we will accelerate our path to drinking the verification can.
This. Just give me the option to have pagination. Sweet, old, pagination. Like here on Hacker News. I can then review one or maybe 2 pages, and that is all. Like a physical magazine where there's a clear end.
I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.
Hang on... Hacker News very clearly has a complex, opaque [1] algorithm that orders stuff. Maybe it's not user-specific, and maybe that's a good dividing line, but these are the kinds of factors we're going to have to think about if we want to introduce regulation around 'algorithms'.
Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree).
([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)
True. There comes a point where the endless pursuit of realism starts getting in the way of a certain kind of narrative creativity. And in the process, we lose what should be the very essence of the word entertainment: to entertain.
The other day, I watched Emmerich’s latest film, Moonfall. A proper disaster movie, with all the necessary tropes. In short, that was real cinema, I had a great time. And yet, a large number of reviews on IMDb kept pointing out how “unrealistic” the film was. But if I’m watching an Emmerich movie, the very last thing I want is realism.
I think this is part of the current zeitgeist. The great inversion of real and virtual, as described by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, seems to make people believe that what happens on screen is reality, and then has to reflect their own conception of reality. The slightest deviation from that conception reminds them that it is only fake, and that they must, at all costs, "return to the matrix" in order to escape the real and the existential dread that follows.
It's as if they're trying to mimic a Twitter post thread, fearing that people won't have the attention span to read a regular article. This is the equivalent to jump cuts in videos.
This article actually solves one of the great mysteries of my life: how to beat that game.
I still remember, back in the mid 90s, playing it with my brother and some friends. We spent so much time trying to beat the default bobsleigh time, land a 100+ meter jump in the ski jumping event, or survive that dreaded third lap in skating. But no matter what, we just couldn't pull it off.
Years later, I even gave it another shot under Dosbox, thinking, "Alright, I was just a clueless kid back then. Now it's my time to shine." Nope. Still couldn't do it.
Turns out we obviously had a cracked copy. But honestly, trying to actually buy a game when you’re a 12yo in mid-90s France (obviously without any Internet connection) wasn’t exactly easy.
It was entirely dictated by TV channels, in order to close the obvious "recording loophole" : instead of watching the show in their VOD app, you could record it, and obviously skip all commercials.
Now you can't anymore. There's even a small dialog when you try that tells you that "Due to a specific demand by <TV Channel>, skipping is a disabled feature."
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