erintoknow

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

The bit in the original Max Headroom TV show where it was literally illegal to have an "off" switch on your TV was extremely on-point.

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.

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.

Hasn't Advertisement also been proven to like, Not Work The Way Companies Think It "Should", and they keep throwing money at it?

This just made me remember DVDs with unskippable promos and how I basically dropped physical media after that.

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.

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.

one of the features that has been invented several times in the post-DVR era is the "skip all commercials in a block automatically" button, and every time they invent it, the networks threaten to sue until the feature is removed or watered down

https://www.cnet.com/culture/replaytv-puts-ad-skipping-on-pause/ https://variety.com/2016/biz/news/dish-nbc-autohop-lawsuit-settled-1201797895/#!

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.

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

it's honestly really hard to decide whether I think most people were just deeply credulous in the mid 20th century. like yeah, i know television and movies aren't accurate portrayals because they're all made by the corporations, and I know there was a counterculture at the time, but what was The Average Joe really like? did they roll their eyes when a vacuum commercial came on, and assume that the guy at the showroom was going to try to fleece them? how many people were like that? how many families smiled and nodded along to the jolly green giant jingle as the wife made a note to buy that specific brand? was it more than now? how many are like that now? how cynical is the average person, really? i only know how cynical me and my friends are, and we're definitely Nihilism Georg, statistical outliers who should not be counted. keeps me up at night