Streaming just waited to roll out unskippable ads so they could win customers early on with an artificially, temporarily better service.
This is the exact same thing cable did when it came out.
No. Cable brought improved picture over broadcast signals, brought programming to underserved areas, and had a greater number and diversity of channels. Those fundamental improvements over the prior technology never went away.
You can complain that cable TV got more expensive over time, but you can say the same thing about cars and houses and health care.
No, cable was commercial-free when it first came out just like streaming was. They repeated the ota signals for the broadcast stations which of course contained commercials, but extremely similarly to streaming they started out with a quality and ad-free pitch for their own networks and then wound up pivoting to screwing over the customer any way possible.
(As they continue to do today, btw.)
Some cable channels are still commercial free, all of them are since the DVR was invented 25 years ago. Watermarks suck, a DVR can’t erase those. But nothing cable has done comes close to the fuckery we’ve gotten with surveillance and tracking, targeted ads, unskippable ads that is the present and future of streaming.
