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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It’s for ad time. At some point, the TV industry realized though couldn’t get studios to make “30 minute” shows shorter then they already were (for ad breaks), so they artificially compress those show times to fit more seconds of ads in addition to the ad breaks they already had time for.

    So say a studio releases a 20 minute episode of content for a 30-minute time block, distribution companies like Hulu will take that 10 minutes for ads, plus compress (by speeding up) the 20 minute episode, too. It wouldn’t even surprise me if they use an algorithm to determine which parts of the episode they can speed up more aggressively than others, to hide that impact from the viewer.




  • People on the opposite side of that tolerance spectrum look at us avid ad avoiders like we put in too much effort to do that, so I see it as two sides of the same coin. I started blocking/avoiding ads due to the nuisance, long before privacy and security became even more prevalent attack vectors through advertising. That was just a benefit to the time saved by blocking ads, but not it’s a primary use case.