antumbral

programmer / game designer / writer

anime


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

I keep meaning to look up an article like this to reference when having this conversation but: yeah, the remote, and the mute button, made TV manufacturers direct adversaries of broadcasters (by way of the advertisers who paid their bills) and it's remarkable that there wasn't a bigger kerfuffle over it.

Per this piece, when mute buttons became available, advertisers had already been upset about the existence of the remote control itself for some time. They considered it ideal that TVs required physical inconvenience to change the channel, so that you would tend to give up and just let commercials happen, burying their messages into your head even if you preferred not to listen.

If that wasn't how people felt, there wouldn't have been any concern, but advertisers sure seemed to think there was. The popularity of the "clicker" indicated that, even by the mid 50s, the public was trying to shy away from something that they'd decided was harmful and undesirable.

imagine that. even in the heydey of television-as-americana, people were going "a soap commercial? i do not need to be bothered with this. i have soap."

anyway, as far as I know there were no lawsuits over this but I'd love to be proven wrong there. it feels like this should have been an early RIAA-MP3 kind of situation, with NAB or someone trying to sue the technology out of existence or have a massive tax levied against it to replace the anticipated revenue that they considered lost.

guessing at why this might not have happened: the broadcasters didn't care, only the advertisers, and what were they supposed to do to pressure the broadcasters? pull out of the lucrative TV market? refuse to run ads on a given channel unless they agreed to... what? what terms could have solved this? the only thing that would make sense would be, like, the stations switching to scrambled signals that could only be displayed by TVs produced under advertiser approval that didn't have mute features

admittedly that would have led to a fascinating dystopia. at first there would have been sets that just overrode volume/mute and fixed it at 50% whenever an ad came on. then they would have produced models that did have remotes, but a signal sent by the station 20 seconds before each ad break would disable the controls until the ad was over.

it would quickly become uneconomical for anyone to produce non-approved sets, and then competing networks would make incompatible sets, and the downwards spiral into paywalled gardens would have happened overnight. TV as we know it could have been destroyed, splintered into Disney- and Netflix- and Hulu and Peacock-only sets 60 years ago. amazing. god why didn't this happen, it would have been so bad for everyone and everything.

it was a stroke of incredible luck that the advertisers didn't make a much bigger mess of things


IkomaTanomori
@IkomaTanomori

It wasn't until the Reagan administration that the courts were corrupt enough, in the new neoliberal neoconservative paradigm, and finance embedded enough in the leadership of even supposedly not-bank companies that arguments over expected revenue became common in lawsuits. In the 70s, let alone the 50s, companies that made stuff still generally made their money by selling that stuff. If they couldn't sell that stuff, it was seen as a failure of the stuff, still. But when everyone started making their money on the interest on loans that financed the purchase of stuff, or loans on loans on loans, that changed. People who are extracting usury expect a steady stream of income forever, and forever compounding and increasing. It's built in to the origin of the word "interest," the assumption that the money could and must grow. For a long time, the core of that was confined to bankers. But then every corporation became a pseudo-bank.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

G-d imagine having to pay out of pocket for a television and it only works with one ad ridden channel, also like the very strange manufactured obsolescence issues that may have arose, but also imagining more well off households having a large number of sets to get as many channels as possible, horrible

Imagine if Sony vs. Universal was decided the other way. VCRs with a built in TV tuner would probably be banned. Possible results: CEDs sticking around for longer, 2 piece video cameras bought just for the tape unit, and UHF tuner timer units that just happen to have an EIAJ output sold like pirate satellite boxes and cable descramblers.

i think it's absolutely fascinating to think about this because we would have found out that the public really, really, really wanted to record TV, and would not have given it up without a fight... except that it cost so much to make a VCR in those days that it would have been very difficult for anyone to justify continuing to build them at scale when none of them could be sold for the specific purpose people wanted.

yeah, you'd have been able to buy aftermarket timers, but you've always been able to buy a lot of grey-area stuff like that, and it was always limited to a vanishingly small portion of the population. so i think it's safe to say that VCRs would have died on the vine except among a small "underground" as it were. your uncle Tim who is constantly winking and telling you he can record that program you wanted to see, because he bought the little box for his VCR that The Gubmint doesn't want him to have, et cetera, et cetera - a remarkable future.

it's interesting that so many people stopped recording live TV once it was no longer convenient with the DTV / HD switchover. We could have had D-VHS decks with digital inputs in every home, there's nothing technically preventing it, but because by the 2000s the consumer electronics manufacturers were also the movie studios, things got snarled up with HDCP and DRM and broadcast flags. So home recordings of TV are now either standard def, or locked on a DVR, or not made at all because of streaming services.

Media is being lost again despite copying and data storage being so cheap, because there's no easy way for anyone to save it and that's how our corporate overlords want it.

Part of the loss of convenience was struggling with cable boxes, too. Once cable systems stopped delivering signals that could be processed by the built-in tuners that televisions had, it became (nearly) impossible to record a station at a pre-set time unless the cable box was tuned to that channel.

It probably helped that there were just plain more companies at the time too. Like more manufacturers of TVs, more companies that wanted to advertise, more everything. Instead of getting locked into one thing, there would always be someone knocking with a better deal if you didn't lock it in, so locking in was just bad business practice.

This is wild considering absolutely no one in my family will mute commercials even with a remote sitting next to them and get confused and upset when I do.

Then as now, the solution was to make the ads twice as loud as the show for people who left the room, further making...some of us...scramble for the remote the instant the ads started and backfiring on their goal.

I can't even stand to watch TV anymore because I spend more time with it muted than not.

There was something deeply unsettling about me muting a commercial at my aunt's place and everyone in the room continued to sit silently staring at the silent TV.

Space aliens is as plausible an explanation as any.

This brings up a memory I had long since forgotten about! At one point, I recall there being some kind of device you'd hook up to your TV that would detect ads and automatically mute them. I have no idea if this ever existed, or if it did but was sued into oblivion, but I've heard nothing about them since hearing about it in the late 90s or early 2000s.

Among the factors I haven't seen in the comments about the tech battles around advertisers fighting mute buttons & VCRs is the role of government regulation. In USA the broadcast frequencies are regulated as a public trust, and regulations cover both what information can be broadcast (obscenity, equal time, etc) and the technical standards of how that information can be encoded (color, stereo, digital). A mute button block implemented by broadcasters at advertisers' request that would control the operation of a consumer's personal property would, I imagine, have been a hard sell conceptually at the FCC (Zenith, RCA, et al would have fought it, at a minimum), and then the technical question of how to implement it would probably have taken years. If color broadcasts and stereo broadcasts are any guide, it would have taken decades for standards to be adopted & for consumers to buy televisions build to accommodate it to replace the ones they already have (and I think, generally, most households had only one TV until into the 1980s).

When I worked at a TV sales and repair place in the 1980s, my boss was fond of pointing out that TVs always cost $500, but those five hundred bucks bought a better TV experience every few years. And well into the 1980s, people bought TVs as furniture. This was so prevalent that one of the most profitable things my boss did was fit modern, sleek, plastic cased TVs into his customers' existing TV cabinets from the 50s-70s.

Up until the moon landing it was common for households to have no television sets.

Congress would also have weighed in. In the 70s the chair of the House committee overseeing the FCC was from San Diego. The local NOW chapter figured out this gave them a pressure point over broadcasters and used it to fight on-air sexism.

Would this have even been technically faesible in the early days? This kind of thing is fairly easy with digital tech, you can sell a locked down device that does everything most people need and then just not allow any software with a certain feature, but back then? Sure, you could maybe put a signal in the v-blank region when there was an advert on to tell the TV not to mute, but given everything back then was chonky components neatly soldered together, wouldn't it be pretty simple to bypass it, or even rewire it to the mute button so the TV automatically detected ads and muted them?

80s tech I can believe could do it. We had scrambled cable by then, for example. But my suspicion would be that generally any pitch starting in "please by this new TV so that" is a formal declaration of format war, so they'd have had to add something genuinely useful alongside the mute-block to stand a chance of winning it.

a funny, vaguely-related thing to this is HDCP, the copy-protection bullshit with HDMI; but like that i imagine even in a world where no-mute tvs existed, there would quickly be third-party unofficial modifications to add it