If people had thought more critically about streaming when it was new, they might have foreseen that the ad-free experience was temporary and would inevitably be replaced with ads. That money was never going to be left on the table long term.
But the ads are worse now, the precedent with a DVR is to be able to control the video stream and skip ads but with streaming there's no such precedent so the technology allows that freedom to be taken away and ads can be made unskippable.
And now we have an opportunity to realize before it's too late that this generation of AI will inevitably lead to as much advertising as we had before, and it will once again become qualitatively worse in that it will be seamlessly and opaquely integrated into AI output without even necessarily any disclosure. I will take a blockable banner ad over that any day.
But the ads are worse now, the precedent with a DVR is to be able to control the video stream and skip ads but with streaming there's no such precedent so the technology allows that freedom to be taken away and ads can be made unskippable.
And now we have an opportunity to realize before it's too late that this generation of AI will inevitably lead to as much advertising as we had before, and it will once again become qualitatively worse in that it will be seamlessly and opaquely integrated into AI output without even necessarily any disclosure. I will take a blockable banner ad over that any day.