I guess everyone is familiar with streaming services like NetFlix, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, etc. With many of them (especially Peacock+, they're the worst) when you start your movie or show, usually what happens (with me at least) is the opening sequence will start (think about the Lion that roars for an MGM movie) when the screen will change, and a commercial (or three or ten) will play, with a countdown timer showing how long they last. Then when they finish, the screen returns to the movies or show you're streaming and it starts over right where it left off. In the example I cited, if I watch an MGM movie, I will briefly see the lion roar, then the screen switches to the commercials, then it returns, and I see the end of the lion roar.

Does that make sense? It's like the commercials are run over top of the movie, and when they run, the underlying movie is paused. Follow what I'm saying?

Well, I don't own a TV, so all the TV I watch I stream from Xfinity (where I do have an account, as the house does have two TV's with cable boxes hooked up to them. But for me to watch TV, I have to go to their streaming website and watch. It's the exact same programs, just being streamed through the internet to a computer rather than through a coax to a cable box. But if I'm watching channel 9 on my computer and my mother is watching channel 9 out on the TV, we're seeing the exact same thing.

I've been watching TV this way since 2019. But recently (within the past few months) I'm noticing something that is... well it's very disturbing to me because it just feels so wrong and wanted to get others take on it.

While streaming live TV now, I'm seeing these commercials come up "over top of the live TV" just like the example above where it comes up, and suddenly there's a counter below counting off the seconds with message below saying "your video will resume shortly", but then when it returns, because it's live TV, I've missed whatever was happening during that commercial break (and it's often three commercials in a row). To wit, I was watching the MLB playoffs on Saturday, it happened again, right in the middle of an inning while live action was occuring... then when that "overlayed" commercial ended, it went back to live TV where that inning had ended and there were now commercials on the live TV feed. I missed whatever happened in that game during those commercials.

And I'm seeing it in every show I watch now.

This just seems wrong to me. I'm already paying Xfinity for the service (A LOT), and I'm already getting all the commercials you get with live TV, AND NOW they're super imposing streamed commercials on top of that. And I guarantee you this will be yet another thing that is met with a collective "yawn" from the consumers. But this is wrong. And not even just on the basis of you're literally missing programming you're paying when the streamed commercial shows and you lose the live feed, but you're like getting force fed more commercials on top of the commercials already present in live TV. And I wonder if those companies that are paying for commercials on say TBS, are aware that viewers who stream TBS from Xfinity's website might not even be seeing them because Xfinity is super imposing other commercials on top of them (this does NOT happen on TV's with the cable boxes... at least not yet, I've had my health aide and family members monitor as they watch exclusively on the cable box.

"This shouldn't happen" is what I say. What say you?

It depends on what you mean with "familiar". I know they exist (the first two at least, the third one I read that name for the first time) but never used their service, so I don’t know how is the experience interacting with them.

I suspect there are many people in a situation similar to mine. That sounds like an inferior version of TV (or at least of what TV was in the late 90s, early 2000s), I don’t get how such an awful experience can gather the success they seem to currently have. "Don’t give them your money" is what I say ;)

This sounds like UK terrestrial TV (more specifically Channel 5 and late night ITV) ~20 years ago - they'd just leave the movie running during the commercial breaks and not care.
Occasionally the film would finish during that break and you'd be treated to an extra five minutes of adverts for their effort before something else came on (because they'd also speed up the credits to under 1 minute runtime).
Youtube is similarly going crazy with adverts now.


Edit: to be clear, both ITV and Channel 5 are / were commercial channels not supported by the TV licence before anybody goes there.

You can research adblocking software in your browser. You can use a ad blocking browser. You also have a more extreme option to buy a device that acts like a turd filter and blocks anything you do not want altogether.

Lets start as I wrote:

1) Browser addons are pretty simple to add a ad blocker or script blocker. Except Chrome. Google is Chrome. They thrive on advertising. Thus....they hate anything blocking ads. Good luck with that.

2) Browsers. TOR has one. Waterfox is a stripped Firefox annnnnnnnddddd.....Mullvad has a browser. If you want a suggestion, use Waterfox. It will be more familiar to casual users. Plus Firefox compatible addons. Another is Brave. Opera is sort of popular.

3) Third is the filtration option. You can buy a device called RaspberryPi. Around $120-200 for a best model+kit to stop advertising altogether. Technically its an entire computer you can use like a normal tower PC....if thats your interest.

....anyway. A bit of software called PiHole can be added to either a Raspberry Pi device or a linux machine. It will filter your internet connection and keep your online experience with all your home devices free and clean from advertising crapola.
Naturally this is going deep. Perhaps to deep for average users. But you go pretty deep for Gothic gaming. I figured wth, he may be this pissed off and want to try it.

edit=typo...

Or you can just turn back to the roots . VHS , DVD , Blu-ray .

Ads during a live stream are way too distruptive. Nobody likes them. Ad breaks were already annoying but forgivable since nothing was missed. Now you'll have ads that completely take you away from the experience and drop you back in like nothing happened.

I am in full support of blocking ads against live streaming services.

Wait. So you pay for these streaming services and they still inject you with ads despite that? Holy sh**. I always assumed no ads were a given... Never had and never will have a streaming subscription, thought it was bad enough already that you don't own anything, but subscribing for ads? How are so many people OK with this?
Even something like subscribing to a channel on Twitch guarantees you no ads on that channel. Wild...

Most streaming services anymore have tiers where usually the first tier is is cheapest do to ads allowed where as the higher tiers has either less ads or no ads and even then at times the ''no ads'' tier will still require you to watch ads depending on what you are watching

Hulu I know the ad free tier I was using years ago had ''exceptions '' to the ad free factor for example I ended up dropping Hulu over that BS

The thing is, from what I understand, streaming isn't nearly the golden goose Netflix made it seem like. For many services it wasn't even profitable for a long time, maybe still isn't. They have to squeeze all they can, raise prices, add adds etc.

And people, well... people are going to be ok with whatever is the new normal as long as they're told it's convenient and that things are the best they ever were and it's the "golden age of television". Sure, we used to get twenty + episodes of Babylon 5 and X-Files every year and now we have 8 episodes of crap like Wednesday every two or three years, but do you want to be the one person left out when your friends are tweeting about the new season? I think not!

I'd say, that depends on what you pay for these services.

I know that Amazon Prime and Netflix definitely have different priced tiers, with the cheapest (or even free) tiers usually being the ones with ads.

I also don't see, what you using "Xfinity" has to do with everything.

As far as I understand it, "Xfinity" in the US is what (e.g.) "Vodafone" or "Telekom" are here in Germany: a provider for the access to internet, telephone and TV.

Besides internet and phone, I can watch TV (both: free TV and/or pay TV) via these - but of course, I have to pay extra for the "pay TV" channels.

And the aforementioned streaming services (Netflix, AP, Paramount+, etc) also need to be paid extra, of course.
They are not included in the provider's basic services, that you pay for.

Yeah, but some services have ads even in the ad-free subscriptions.
The "ad-free" definition there is that there's no commercials in the middle of the film/episode, and there are no third party advertisers, but they still have those short clips of other films before they show what you actually want to see.

What's most annoying is that very often they are completely unrelated and mismatching shows with whatever you are actually trying to watch, it's usually whatever that specific streaming service has as an exclusive content. Yeah.
It doesn't solve the problem though. There are DVDs that force you to watch trailers of other DVD releases, not to mention the forced FBI warning in R1 releases, or the legal statement that lasts five minutes in 25 languages in R2 releases.

I suppose you could rip the main movie from the disc and watch only that, but it's very much work just to enjoy a movie with no distractions.

Of course, if you actually go to the cinema and watch something there, they are showing at least 10 minutes of commercial before the film, so the only place that is guaranteed to be 100% ad-free are film archive screenings (and even that may be different in different places/countries).

That you will have to watch ads and pay was predictable long time ago. No public company will leave money on the table. What I find incredible is their 0 love for their subscribers. If you subscribe to all of them you will still have problems to find old movies in their catalogs and all of them have bad search engines and bad recommendations.

Thank you for buying the movie. Here is an unskippable set of warnings and disclaimers as a reward.
"Don't play this movie on oil rigs, or we're coming after you.....This time in turkish!!!. Oh yeah!!!!"

And they wonder why piracy is still so popular...

Probably can be made profitable, but not enough, is never enough!

It doesn't help that many (most) children spend a lot of time on youtube since young age. That new normal is here to stay and enjoy while we can use addblocks, once they start to get traction on mobile something's gonna change.

I apologize for being unclear.. yet again. I try to be clear... and my posts turn into walls of text... and I'm still not clear.

I'll try this.

OldFatGuy, from all of the available choices, decides to choose Comcast (Xfinity) cable TV for his TV service. So let's say 2000 channels are available with the cable TV package OldFatGuy purchased and pays monthly for, and one of those channels is Cable News Network (CNN).. OldFatGuy has two options to receive his TV. The first way to watch is on a regular TV through a cable box and remote that you use to change channels. So, when watching on a regular TV, OldFatGuy uses the remote and chooses channel 817 (CNN) and watches CNN. As with other live TV programming, as he watches, the news will occasionally break for commercials. When I was in Germany in the late 1970's their commercials all occurred in between shows whereas here in the US commercial breaks occur throughout the show but either way you get commercials with your live TV.

The second way for OldFatGuy to watch TV is through Comcast's (Xfinity's) streaming website. This allows OldFatGuy to watch TV on his phone for example. When watching live TV on his phone (or in my case my laptop computer), he can watch channel 817 (CNN) and will get the same exact show, with the same exact commercial breaks, as if he had watched it on the TV with the remote through the cable box. Exactly. The. Same. And this is true for all 2000 commercials that OldFatGuy pays for in his cable TV package. OldFatGuy does NOT have to "pay" for streaming these channels... he pays for them in his cable TV package and the streaming service is merely a different way to watch these channels.

However, now, when streaming channel 817 (CNN), he not only gets all the commercials that anyone else would see while watching CNN, Xfinity is "interupting" the live TV feed and super imposing other commercials over top of the live TV feed. These commercials appear, a timer underneath counts off the seconds, and when done you are returned to CNN. And whatever was going on during the live CNN broadcast feed during those super imposed commercials you missed. You were not watching CNN during that time even though you had chosen CNN just as someone watching on a TV had chosen it.

Imagine if this wasn't streaming and you were watching the cable TV you paid for, on your TV, and you were watching CNN on channel 817 on your TV. Then, suddenly, whatever was on CNN at the time would be interrupted and a new screen would appear on your TV set with commercials directly from Xfinity and a note underneath saying "Your live TV experience will return shortly." Get it? You're already paying for the cable TV service, you're already being advertised to by whatever channels you watch (even "public" channels have "commercials" nowadays) AND NOW you're being force fed sets of commercials over top of whatever channel you're watching at the time by Comcast (or whatever your cable TV provider is).

That is what is happening. I pay for the cable TV every month. For that I get like 2000 channels, along with some premium channels like HBO, Showtime, MGM+, etc. And I get the option to watch my TV either on a regular TV set with a cable box and remote to change channels or through a computer or phone through streaming and using the mouse to choose channels. It's supposed to be the same thing. But when streaming now, they have added this new layer of commercials over the live TV feed. And ad blockers won't block these any more than ad blockers will block ads in the middle of any live TV show you're currently watching.

And again, not for nothing, but if you're a company that pays for advertising with say... CNN as an example again, you are paying a certain amount of dollars "per viewer" such that you have to pay much more for ads on a TV channel/show that is watched by 100 million viewers than if watched by 10 million viewers. And I can't help but wonder how those companies feel about paying for commercials on CNN... while viewers who are watching CNN via the stream may not be seeing those commercials you paid for and instead are seeing other commercials streamed in over top of the live TV feed. I know if I were an executive at a big company that paid millions of dollars for a thirty second ad on the Anderson Cooper 360 program I would be pissed if I discovered that two million of those viewers aren't even seeing the commercial I paid to have run because of this practice. I wouldn't be happy at all.

This is just not right. It's just not.