Didn't cable TV used to be like $80-120 for top packages (equivalent to having all of the content subs)? What is that in today's dollars?

Like I feel like it's pretty common to be either a Netflix or Disney/Hulu household all the time, and then just subscribe to one other in any given month depending on what show you're mainly watching.

Like now that Slow Horses is back, it's time to wait a couple weeks and then switch to Apple TV for a month to catch the 6 episodes.

My goal is not only skipping ads but also skipping around in program content with low latency and high responsiveness. This is because another result of the failing streaming media economic model is that content providers are "padding" the length of content they commission to cut their per-hour costs while retaining perceived value. So an 8 episode mini-series is really ~6 episodes of story stretched to fill 8 and now a two hour 'original' movie is just a bloated cut of a 95 minute tight story. Once you've paid for the actors, crew and sets, shooting longer scenes and using more coverage shots is cheap. Having a background in film and video production, it's surprisingly easy for me to spot content that's been padded and then self-edit it in real-time - although features like auto scene detection and variable speed playback (with audio pitch correction) would make it even better.

Even the better DVRs in cable/satellite boxes are too laggy and, of course, most don't provide much flexibility in skip increments and other necessary features. Media distributors are only providing DVR as a checkbox feature because they can up-charge for it but then hard-limiting its features because it hurts the other side of their business model. I don't expect the "almost acceptable" built-in DVR I have today to remain acceptable for long - because the DVR provider's incentives aren't aligned with mine. It's slowly going to keep getting nerfed, which is why a stand-alone DVR is the only viable option for the long-term. And thanks to HDCP DRM and the DMCA, the only DVRs which will give viewers what they want will be DIY hardware running open source components. My medium term plan is to train up an AI for auto-skipping commercials.

I had a DirecTV DVR box that had unskippable ads for some content. It would download fresh local ads from the internet into the ad breaks from the pre-recorded satellite content. Blocking the cable box from the internet just ensured it was always the same old ad content or forced the original ad segments but also limited/broke a lot of other features of the cable box.

It only did it on some shows on some networks. Paramount was the most obvious one, a lot of the recordings of their shows had that "feature" enabled.

I'm not the one that needs to do any crawling. Guess what I discovered these past couple of days? I get along fine without Hulu. And JFC, $20/month and I still get ads? Yeah, piss off with that shit, I'll read a book first.

I'm not so sure it's a keen business strategy to piss off a bunch of folks, and just days later while they're still a bit pissed, jack up the prices. Might work for some, for others like myself: "wow, check out the big, clanky balls on Iger".