People still watch things? Losers. I have all my entertainment beamed directly into my head via orbital pink lasers.
You piker! I get m…oh, I don’t have time for this, Gilmore Girls is starting.
Netflix ain’t bad but there is really not much selection. Here is an example
I did a search for “History of the World Part I” on Netflix and it gave me the option to explore titles related to it. Same with a lot of other movies. I don’t want to explorre related items. I want to see the one that I searched for.
The problem is still with us. I only noticed when I got to the post where someone said “I should have just gone to Blockbuster and rented it”.
And I went “WTF?!” and checked the posting date.
To be fair, it was not uncommon 6.5 years ago when he posted this…
“Television is an advertising medium that occasionally shows less overtly commercial content.” - wanted to get my preferred version into the stream. Glad to see yours, though.
IFC is one of the biggest offenders. I swear I’ve seen them set aside four hours for movies I know run only a little over two hours.
Everything free is worth what you pay for it. Unless it costs more than it’s worth… but you often don’t find that out until later.
(Paraphrasing Heinlein, there.)
That’s pretty common for many stations now. There is a bright side, if you time it right you can actually switch between 2 channels and watch nearly 2 shows while missing the commercials.
But yeah, I’m behind this pitting.
Didn’t they used to actually break at scene breaks, which are different for each movie? The description here makes it sound like they’d cut off in the middle of a line if it had been 8.5 minutes.
I don’t watch much TV at all but there are tons of streaming services out there. I found history of the world on solarmovie btw. I nor my wife never had trouble finding what we wanted to watch. But then again my HTPC has a lot more streaming services than those walmart boxes come with and I just search 1 time and it searches through all of them so long as I’m signed in…
I even did a search a few days ago for an old, what I thought to be a more obscure movie called time bandits and found it on hntv, though it wasn’t as enjoyable to watch as I remembered and stopped 15 minutes into it.
There’s so many streaming services I don’t know what you can’t find these days. I have one app, i’m pretty sure it can’t be too legal but has Jurassic World and a lot of newly released films. Too bad I’m not a movie buff, I mostly just watch documentaries
Ha! Much more accurate than mine, in this time of product placement run amuck.
I watched a made for TV movie a while back, and it had something I’m glad never caught on. Every so often in the movie, the camera would be situated such that a logo was centered in the view. A tracking shot in a hallway would stop on a poster on a wall that was clearly branded, a car at a gas station would be photographed so the advertising bumper sticker was shown, etc. And at the next commercial break, the first commercial was for that product “featured” in the previous act.
It was almost comical. It was both subtle, yet once you noticed it, far more egregious than, say, one of the characters eating a Subway sandwich or drinking a Coke. It was almost an infomercial with a plot.
The movie actually wasn’t so bad, but the product placement should put it in the advertising hall of fame (shame?). Wonder if it is available on DVD, and whether the product placement survived? or, once the movie fulfilled its function, it was scrapped. Did anyone else see it when it was new? I can’t remember the title.
That sounds fairly extreme, but every single TV show that has an automotive sponsor - not even necessarily an ad sponsor, just a funding sponsor - has the shot of the maker badge zooming into the camera as the hero parks.
But yeah, there are whole agencies whose clients are products, and producers looking for extra revenue are happy to call them up and see who’s available for a negative-scale role.
Feh. You don’t have Brain Lasered On Demand? Loser.
I was watching Idiocracy on commercial TV … I swear I couldn’t tell when the movie stopped and the commercials began. Fucking spooky …
You’re still on pink? Pfft.
There’s a saying I’ve heard referring to online services like Google or Facebook but also applies to commercial television:
“If you’re getting something for free you are not the customer, you are the product”.
They survive by selling your eyeballs to advertisers.
Absolutely. Anyone who fails to understand this may as well walk around carnivals with twenties hanging out of their pockets.
The entire purpose of television is to present ads. Everything else is at least secondary and done only to further that prime purpose. (If you disagree, spend five coherent minutes thinking about why ratings drive the entire process.)
It is essential, though, to distinguish between content and commodity, here. One of the usual arguments is something about HBO or Sopranos or premium movie channels. Here’s the divider: if you are paying for the material, it’s a commodity and (largely but not entirely) outside the advertising-first model. If you are viewing the material “for free” because it’s intermixed with any form of ads or marketing, it’s content.
“Television is an advertising medium that occasionally shows less overtly commercial content.”
ETA: And to forestall the other leg of arguments, “television” is all mass forms of someone else’s video delivered to your eyes for entertainment purposes.
Yeah, but IFC doesn’t edit the time/content of their movies, so I’ll cut 'em some slack.
Same thing happened to me when I tried to watch the pilot episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation. It felt like 45 seconds of Star Trek and 45 minutes of commercials!
That alone kept me from ever intentionally watching ST:TNG again.