No, but companies are made of individual people who get more or less greedy with time, like most other attributes of people. Which is why I said ‘people got greedy’.
Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026
fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoGreed isn’t new, streaming companies aren’t more or less greedy than cable companies. But internet companies innovated surveillance capitalism which cable companies couldn’t do with their infrastructure. Streaming just waited to roll out unskippable ads so they could win customers early on with an artificially, temporarily better service.
Libra@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is the exact same thing cable did when it came out.
fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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 and wound up pivoting to screwing over the customer any way possible.
fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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.