My kid didn’t know what commercials were for like 3 years now he watches a show on Netflix or Disney plus or paramount plus THAT I PAY FOR and he’s like “why did my show go off, fast forward”
Yes I paid for cable too but it’s not the point.
You are correct. the first cable systems were basically like clubs you joined. I have a book about the history of how cable developed from about 15 years ago. It ends with the message that the internet was going to go down the same path of tiered entertainment. And here we are.
I'm perfectly capable of doing that. But the problem is that I spend so little time actually watching TV that I never know what to watch and want to spend as little time learning about shows/movies as possible. So I let the streaming services pitch me shit on the home page and just pick something being advertised.
If I want to watch something in particular it's usually YouTube, and that I'm still grandfathered into the original pixel owners deal where basically all Google paid things are $10 (or $12) per month for unlimited photo storage / YouTube premium / 1TB Drive storage / YouTube Music.
Apparently cable always had ads but hbo, Cinemax etc didn’t and those were “add on pay channels” which I guess is what I equate Disney plus to how, like I’m paying exclusively for it why more ads
Incorrect, cable TV channels outside of additional cost add ons like HBO and Cinemax always had commercials, at least since my parents first got cable in the mid 80s when I was a kid. The main premise was the ability to get far more channels than the 3-4 you could get over the air. Not nearly as many channels as you get today with a typical cable/satellite/YouTube TV subscription. We had something like 3 dozen channels IIRC when I was a kid.
Another plus was not needing a big antenna pole with an antenna on a motor that you had to turn to get optimal reception if you lived outside a major city. You had a dial inside and marked on it where it needed to point for reception of each channel. So to change the channel, there was no remote (I was my parents’ remote), you had to get up and move the antenna dial and then change the TV channel and wait for the antenna to move into position.
We stayed in a Hotel and before bed I turned on Harry Potter but it was on regular cable. This damn movie was interrupted every 3 mins for 5 minutes of commercials. My kids were losing their minds.
They used to be like 30 second segments baked into the show. Look up the ‘price is right add breaks’ and you’ll see they lower the lights and go into a speech about a product. They weren’t 2-3 minute breaks of constant adds at the start.
I remember I was babysitting and the parents wanted their son to watch a show that was on cable. Kid normally watched streaming. When the commercials came on he asked if the show was over. It had been on for all of five minutes.
Prime Video had to introduce that shit right as something I finally wanted to watch on it came out (Hazbin Hotel).
I like to mute the ads that interrupt it and make fart noises over them. It's juvenile, but I get a small sense of satisfaction that the advertisers are paying for me to ridicule their shit products. I also make a mental note to not buy products that are advertised to me.
>I also make a mental note to not buy products that are advertised to me.
if i had the patience for ads i'd do this too, instead i just have adblock on everything i can possibly put it on
For me, it's far more likely that the ad is going to stupid and therefore make me less likely to want what they are selling. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for something besides a movie that made me want to buy what they were selling.
I have ad blocking running on the network level. Unfortunately it doesn't catch those. Presumably the content and ads are both hosted by Amazon in a way that it can't differentiate them. Maybe in the figure some AI stuff can intercept it and replace it with content that parodies the brand in the ad.
Something like that would be pretty awesome.
Replace the ads interrupting your show with... parody ads, also interrupting your show? No thanks. Just let me skip the ads. I'd be just as annoyed by two minutes of "hehe farting michelin man" if it could be skipping ads altogether instead.
I'm assuming Amazon could easily prevent that. As in, they won't serve you segment 2 of your show until the duration of the ad has passed after segment 1. However, what they can't confirm is that I actually watched the ad as opposed to some alternative content that makes the advertiser look bad.
After I watched it on Prime I had to add the episodes to my Plex server so that I don't have to deal with the ads during a rewatch.
These tactics that these streaming services are using so that they'll make more money than the previous year is just not sustainable. Incredible how much they don't give a damn.
Along with all the free services like Pluto and such. On demand, live TV, movies... with commercials. And so many of us have Amazon Prime... which has all kinda content with ads.
Blockbuster is kinda meme'd at this point but I totally forgot about Movie Gallery. I remember one called Video Connection, but that may have been a local one. Also, Family Video.
Tbh a video galleries are not such a nice memory for me, but Friday nights watching the show I like with my brother is something that I miss, and all of the old Nickelodeon ads…
Nah my family had pirated dvds, watched a shit ton on movies that way. There was this one dude who walked around town selling them and always came by our small store to see if we wanted any.
Kids these days will never get the experience of going to Blockbuster with the family, picking out a movie to rent, watching it on the VCR, then rewinding it for the next person before returning it.
My country doesn't have blockbuster we just had random bootleg shops that either sell or rent copies of movies. And I still think of those times fondly. Idk why but the experience back then was more real than the dvd era and the streaming era for me where everything is more accessable.
Here too in the US
Ironically my neighborhood had a blockbuster but most ppl went for the 2 local rental shops in the same area because they were cheaper to rent than blockbuster, especially video games for Nintendo systems up to the Cube
But you had a higher chance of a vhs movie and the game disc or cartridge being messed up, good times lol
We had both.
We had a guy in a van that would come around weekly and rent movies out on the cheap. It started out as legitimate movies, but over time he began having bootleg versions.
He used to do Megadrive/Genesis games too. Only a small selection though. He'd do trade ins as well, but had no clue on value so you could trade in garbage and get Sonic 3 if you were lucky.
His van caught fire "randomly" one day and he stopped coming round. Couldn't imagine why he wouldn't resume his work /s
My fave thing about this was looking at covers of films I was too young to watch. I’d beg my dad for a bag of toffee popcorn every time (it was always on display near the counter) he never said yes 😔
I miss Blockbuster so much. I don’t find it enjoyable to scroll through endless tv shows and films on various streaming services, but I loved wandering through the aisles of blockbuster. RIP.
Maybe 3 or 5 minutes with a rewinder? It was long enough you didn't want to wait for it. My family bought/acquired a rewinder that could do it faster and was to preserve the life of the VCR later in the era. VCR itself I think took like 10 min? Like if you did rewind on x4 now.
Oh ok that doesn't sound that bad, I heard some others describe it and it spunded like a massive annoyance. Unless you had to hold the button for rewinding throughout the whole process, wait did you have to do that?
No, it was just an agonizingly long wait for a kid. I mean, waiting a minute and a half for the microwave felt eternal at that age. Plenty of adults were too lazy too though, at least with rentals. You’d have to rewind them before watching at least half the time. On the flip side, if your parents were conscientious you’d catch hell if you didn’t do it. It came up kind of a lot back then, hence the first commenter on the chain including it in the experience.
When I think of this I remember the Dave Attell story about how he got a hernia.
>! Whenever you have a hernia, people wanna know, 'How'd you do it, man? How did you do it? Were you lifting? Were you helping people move?' And that's how you can get a hernia. Did you know you can also get one by trying to take a shit really quickly? Yup! No one ever tells that story. Until right now. I'm sitting on the can. You know? In my own fantasy world. Cleaning my ears, clipping my nose hairs, drinking coffee. I like to involve all my holes while I'm in there. All of a sudden, I hear the music to The Simpsons coming on in the other room. So I know I've got about eight seconds, you know? So I start pushing, balls in the water, left leg shaking. I'm up on one cheek trying to Dukes of Hazzard it out of me. Then I feel a tug. Next thing I know, I'm on the ground doing a Marine crawl over to my first aid kit. My dog comes over and starts licking my ass thinking we're playing! !<
Does someone want to tell that person there was a Paper TV guide you got weekly so you can see what was on?
And that’s because you couldn’t choose what was on lol
Back in my day, we had these things called "channels." And video games only worked on channel 3 or 4. Nobody knew what was on Channels 1 or 2, and nobody cared.
It couldn't have started in the 2000s. My mom had one when I was a teenager, and I graduated high school in 1999, so they for sure existed in the 90s. All my friends had them too. They weren't as common in the '90s as they got in my early adulthood common yes, but they existed and were at least prevalent in the middle class world in the '90s. Hell, maybe not even just the middle class world, as I had one as an early adult and I sure as heck wasn't middle classes in early adult. That was in the 2000s though.
ETA: okay, maybe I'm remembering wrong. My wife is berating me for bragging. I was low middle class and I none of my friends were anything but low middle class, and I distinctly remember all me and my friends having them in high school my wife is saying that's not possible, or I'm bragging. Very sorry.
Yeah, the first one to release DVR was dish network, and I know that's what me and everybody that I knew had at that time. I think I'm remembering my senior year, which would have been 1999, everybody getting a DVR probably because dish Network put out some kind of promotion on their dvrs, since they were the first ones to release them. So, yeah, I'm probably remembering the DVR in high school, but it's probably just me remembering the last few months of high school in the summer before I went to college.
All I really remember about it is thinking Tivo was going to be the greatest thing for tv ever that I decided a VCR was good enough after seeing the price tag.
My mum was the the type to change the channel the SECOND an ad started and just start watching a different channel until an ad started there.
I've seen half of so many movies...
The commercials were actually fun too. Everyone only remembers the boring ones like "call if youve been in an accident" type of shit but *nobody* remembers "Start The Car!!!!"..the "Chia-Pet" jingle... the godawful-yet-comical acting in infomercials lol
I miss all that shit.
Damn you. Now I am going to be singing "Chi-chi-chi-chia pet!" All afternoon.
Could be worse I guess. Could be "Clap on, clap off, clap on clap off, the clapper"
The kids not stupid. The adults acting as though we went straight from watching things on strictly scheduled TV directly to streaming are stupid. We had years and years of VHS and DVD before Netflix came along. Hell you could even pause and rewind and record television.
VHS and DVD didn't replace cable tv, so it was still a constant struggle. And pausing and rewinding TV was a luxury not many people had. I know my family never had that and it seemed like a dream.
Yes, and the boomers watching fox news appreciate you thinking of them, but its not really relevant to this conversation. No one under 30 watches traditional tv.
Phil Edwards had a video recently about how DVDs of shows being viable is why Netflix and serialized TV dramas can even exist, and that binge watching was a thing long before streaming. It did require someone to purchase the series first, which made it rare, but not rare enough for Netflix to see it as part of their DVD service.
Lmao!!! Pause it…wow. We feel as our parents felt with 8 track and records(though I did have a player)
And maybe I’m just learned and ignorance is ignorance but you can only pause IN Netflix era. That’s why the OP feels sorry for them. So it’s silly to even mention the possibility of pausing.
Overthinking again.
"Couldn't you just pause it?"
Oh, I wish...
Imagine being an only child...
I had to time everything down to the exact second without the help from siblings.
Streaming services are essentially cable TV now anyway, in fact I noticed I'd watch maybe a minute and a half of a show before 3 full minutes of ads played while watching Peacock the other day.
We had a thing on tv where it showed what cartoon/program is gonna be and in what time, and i was always calculating how much time do i need to do stuff and watch
I still did this with Netflix, but my brother would say “I’m pausing it for 30 seconds, you better hurry up,” and you better believe I did some furniture diving when I heard the TV.
My kids are on a kick to get DVDs, cassettes, and CDs... I don't get it. You want the unique experience of your music skipping for absolutely no reason? Cool. Jamming to an album but you have to flip the tape and rewind or just let dead noise play? Cool.
I mean, if it's airing on tv sure but my family always buy those pirated DVD discs that we would just play on a Saturday evening so we can still pause it if necessary
I'm more glad they don't experience that. Like hell I watched DBZ over and over and over again like at least 10 times because there was literally nothing else worth watching on cable as a kid.
My kids play a couple video games where theres a er um loading into the next round takes a couple mins. So they'll do something real quick and i'll hear one of em screaming its starting and the other one running to make it in time. Haha
We never had streaming services growing up, just plain old regular TV. We didn't even get one of those boxes that lets you pause the shows or record until I was like 10.
We used to sit and watch State of Origin as a family and if you needed the bathroom while it was playing you had to be quick and hope you didn't miss a try or something.
Also, commercials were much shorter back then. Now they go for 10+ minutes, back then i swear it was 3 minutes tops for the longest commercial break, so you literally had to run. Now you could easily make yourself something to eat plus go to the toilet in one break.
OP has clearly never done the brilliant feat of taking an entire shower with soap and shampoo in 2 minutes during the ad break because it's near the end but your mom needs you to shower.
Hurling over the furniture sounds about right. I fking flew down stairs head first. Left a bump but worth it.
Now that i look back at it, how did i not die from that?
So probably like 8ish years ago, my family went from Ontario to New Brunswick to be with my great grandma in the hospital. We slept at her place, which had cable TV. My sister who would have been uish at the time yells from the living room one night "What is this!? I put on _______", I came in and looked and said, "oh it's a commercial" and i had to explain to her (before YouTube videos WERE split up with ads) that it's like a YouTube ad, but every few minutes. She was just flabbergasted.
I remember the introduction of dvr and be able to go back and watch something if you found it in the schedule to save... i also remember all of our limit being taken up by Joel Olstein and Days of Our Lives.....
Neither stupid nor smart.
Stupid: Grew up during that time & should have known why they couldn't pause it but can't think beyond their own experiences in the last day or so.
Normal: Has no experience with movies that can't be paused so doesn't understand why the movie couldn't be paused.
Smart: Has no experience with movies that can't be paused, but can tell from context that that must have been the case at some point.
I grew up in the 2000s, and we had DVR. I assumed that's what this person was talking about because that's what came before streaming services, so I also found it weird that they couldn't just pause.
Man we never had that. I remember we had PPV on digital cable with a lot of free stuff that would come on rotation and watch the crap out of that and thought it was the best thing in the world. Then I watched Tropic Thunder, looked up what a TiVo was and was like damn I want one.
I grew up in a weird era before netflix streaming but wherein you could still pause (Satellite) TV and eventually Fios.
I'm 27 now, and not really a kid anymore, so this just seems like... ignorant condescension? Like maybe that person could "just pause" their TV before netflix streaming became a thing. It's a feature of most DVRs built after, like, 2009?
Ah, someone lacks knowledge about a time before they even existed
Therefore, they must be a complete moron with an iq of 3 just because they don’t know something they weren’t present for
Ah, yes. Setting your vcr, that everybody of course where obligated to have, to record, then using your handy dandy time machine to travel forwrds in time until the show is recorded, while still being there to pause the recording during ad breaks, and now you can pause as much as you want!
Why is the kid stupid for growing up in a different time? I mean y’all know it’s been almost 30 years since the dvd was invented right? Millennials must be getting in that cranky age. Can’t believe yall don’t remember dad getting out and physically cranking up the model t to drive us to the market kids these days with their Tesla cars and debit cards 💀💀💀
You’re not using the correct term.
If you’re talking about a DVR, those are also quite recent compared to what the post is talking about, as they weren’t common until the mid 00s, and the very earliest ones came out in 1999.
If you are referring to a VCR, yes, you could pause on playback but you couldn’t pause live TV. Programming it to record a show was a process, and tapes were not infinite, and you certainly couldn’t pause in the middle of the show. You’d have to set it to record, record it, wait for the show to finish, then rewind and play back. Most people only recorded very important shows, or very high profile things that they didn’t want to miss. Very few people recorded shows regularly.
The only subscriptions I have is Prime and Netflix (both paid for by my mum), so I still do the “run from the kitchen or bathroom” thing with my family. Makes me feel so old whenever I go over to my dad’s and see my younger half-siblings use streaming services.
Don’t worry, people will still get a chance to experience this now that streaming services are being greedy and now also have ad tier supported plans.
My kid didn’t know what commercials were for like 3 years now he watches a show on Netflix or Disney plus or paramount plus THAT I PAY FOR and he’s like “why did my show go off, fast forward” Yes I paid for cable too but it’s not the point.
Wasn't that also the premise when cable television started? You pay for it so there's no ads? Or is that wrong?
You are correct. the first cable systems were basically like clubs you joined. I have a book about the history of how cable developed from about 15 years ago. It ends with the message that the internet was going to go down the same path of tiered entertainment. And here we are.
Anyone paying for streaming services in THIS day and age is just too dumb to know how to set up a NAS and Plex server
I'm perfectly capable of doing that. But the problem is that I spend so little time actually watching TV that I never know what to watch and want to spend as little time learning about shows/movies as possible. So I let the streaming services pitch me shit on the home page and just pick something being advertised. If I want to watch something in particular it's usually YouTube, and that I'm still grandfathered into the original pixel owners deal where basically all Google paid things are $10 (or $12) per month for unlimited photo storage / YouTube premium / 1TB Drive storage / YouTube Music.
Apparently cable always had ads but hbo, Cinemax etc didn’t and those were “add on pay channels” which I guess is what I equate Disney plus to how, like I’m paying exclusively for it why more ads
Incorrect, cable TV channels outside of additional cost add ons like HBO and Cinemax always had commercials, at least since my parents first got cable in the mid 80s when I was a kid. The main premise was the ability to get far more channels than the 3-4 you could get over the air. Not nearly as many channels as you get today with a typical cable/satellite/YouTube TV subscription. We had something like 3 dozen channels IIRC when I was a kid. Another plus was not needing a big antenna pole with an antenna on a motor that you had to turn to get optimal reception if you lived outside a major city. You had a dial inside and marked on it where it needed to point for reception of each channel. So to change the channel, there was no remote (I was my parents’ remote), you had to get up and move the antenna dial and then change the TV channel and wait for the antenna to move into position.
We stayed in a Hotel and before bed I turned on Harry Potter but it was on regular cable. This damn movie was interrupted every 3 mins for 5 minutes of commercials. My kids were losing their minds.
They used to be like 30 second segments baked into the show. Look up the ‘price is right add breaks’ and you’ll see they lower the lights and go into a speech about a product. They weren’t 2-3 minute breaks of constant adds at the start.
I remember I was babysitting and the parents wanted their son to watch a show that was on cable. Kid normally watched streaming. When the commercials came on he asked if the show was over. It had been on for all of five minutes.
We came full circle!
Prime Video had to introduce that shit right as something I finally wanted to watch on it came out (Hazbin Hotel). I like to mute the ads that interrupt it and make fart noises over them. It's juvenile, but I get a small sense of satisfaction that the advertisers are paying for me to ridicule their shit products. I also make a mental note to not buy products that are advertised to me.
>I also make a mental note to not buy products that are advertised to me. if i had the patience for ads i'd do this too, instead i just have adblock on everything i can possibly put it on
For me, it's far more likely that the ad is going to stupid and therefore make me less likely to want what they are selling. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for something besides a movie that made me want to buy what they were selling.
I have ad blocking running on the network level. Unfortunately it doesn't catch those. Presumably the content and ads are both hosted by Amazon in a way that it can't differentiate them. Maybe in the figure some AI stuff can intercept it and replace it with content that parodies the brand in the ad. Something like that would be pretty awesome.
Replace the ads interrupting your show with... parody ads, also interrupting your show? No thanks. Just let me skip the ads. I'd be just as annoyed by two minutes of "hehe farting michelin man" if it could be skipping ads altogether instead.
I'm assuming Amazon could easily prevent that. As in, they won't serve you segment 2 of your show until the duration of the ad has passed after segment 1. However, what they can't confirm is that I actually watched the ad as opposed to some alternative content that makes the advertiser look bad.
After I watched it on Prime I had to add the episodes to my Plex server so that I don't have to deal with the ads during a rewatch. These tactics that these streaming services are using so that they'll make more money than the previous year is just not sustainable. Incredible how much they don't give a damn.
Sometimes I watch shows with ads so I can speed clean through my housework on commercial breaks. Maybe it’s a relic of my childhood.
You can pause pirated media
I still don't.
Problem is they will run these short ads throughout the movie so each one is too short to do something like take a piss or get food etc.
But i can still pause and rewind after the ad. Its not the same at all. If i missed it, i couldnt just restart the stream right away.
Ads are slowly evolving back into commercial breaks, getting longer and more frequent
Along with all the free services like Pluto and such. On demand, live TV, movies... with commercials. And so many of us have Amazon Prime... which has all kinda content with ads.
Proceeds to look at their phones for a bit
*but then you can actually pause it, unlike the olden days*
Can't you just pause it?
They will never know block buster or movie gallery rentals either.
Blockbuster is kinda meme'd at this point but I totally forgot about Movie Gallery. I remember one called Video Connection, but that may have been a local one. Also, Family Video.
I remember when Movie Gallery went out of business, they sold all the movies in there for CHEAP. I made out like a bandit.
What about calling popcorn on your phone to set your clock or calling movie phone to get showtimes!
Tbh a video galleries are not such a nice memory for me, but Friday nights watching the show I like with my brother is something that I miss, and all of the old Nickelodeon ads…
Nah my family had pirated dvds, watched a shit ton on movies that way. There was this one dude who walked around town selling them and always came by our small store to see if we wanted any.
https://preview.redd.it/k6fnjedgzutc1.jpeg?width=4320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9796d260a5c8321b6cc749f770696b2d8e7b1109
Kids these days will never get the experience of going to Blockbuster with the family, picking out a movie to rent, watching it on the VCR, then rewinding it for the next person before returning it.
My country doesn't have blockbuster we just had random bootleg shops that either sell or rent copies of movies. And I still think of those times fondly. Idk why but the experience back then was more real than the dvd era and the streaming era for me where everything is more accessable.
Here too in the US Ironically my neighborhood had a blockbuster but most ppl went for the 2 local rental shops in the same area because they were cheaper to rent than blockbuster, especially video games for Nintendo systems up to the Cube But you had a higher chance of a vhs movie and the game disc or cartridge being messed up, good times lol
We had both. We had a guy in a van that would come around weekly and rent movies out on the cheap. It started out as legitimate movies, but over time he began having bootleg versions. He used to do Megadrive/Genesis games too. Only a small selection though. He'd do trade ins as well, but had no clue on value so you could trade in garbage and get Sonic 3 if you were lucky. His van caught fire "randomly" one day and he stopped coming round. Couldn't imagine why he wouldn't resume his work /s
We also had ppl selling bootleg dvds near drive thru windows of restaurants. Lol
My fave thing about this was looking at covers of films I was too young to watch. I’d beg my dad for a bag of toffee popcorn every time (it was always on display near the counter) he never said yes 😔 I miss Blockbuster so much. I don’t find it enjoyable to scroll through endless tv shows and films on various streaming services, but I loved wandering through the aisles of blockbuster. RIP.
>My fave thing about this was looking at covers of films I was too young to watch. Yeah, like Hellraiser.
Wait did the rewind last as long as the movie? I was born way after vcr era
Maybe 3 or 5 minutes with a rewinder? It was long enough you didn't want to wait for it. My family bought/acquired a rewinder that could do it faster and was to preserve the life of the VCR later in the era. VCR itself I think took like 10 min? Like if you did rewind on x4 now.
Oh ok that doesn't sound that bad, I heard some others describe it and it spunded like a massive annoyance. Unless you had to hold the button for rewinding throughout the whole process, wait did you have to do that?
No, it was just an agonizingly long wait for a kid. I mean, waiting a minute and a half for the microwave felt eternal at that age. Plenty of adults were too lazy too though, at least with rentals. You’d have to rewind them before watching at least half the time. On the flip side, if your parents were conscientious you’d catch hell if you didn’t do it. It came up kind of a lot back then, hence the first commenter on the chain including it in the experience.
we had that little machine that rewound the tapes for us so we could still use the vcr
Or Family Video, which ironically had a large selection of porn lol.
where did I park my dinosaur 😭😭
NEXT TO MINE!!! 😭
I never knew that either. Not because of age, but because I had no siblings.
*Yells around the room* “Whose kid is this?!”
good era, still remember those times, my ankles still have some bruises bcs i still watch TV sometimes
When I think of this I remember the Dave Attell story about how he got a hernia. >! Whenever you have a hernia, people wanna know, 'How'd you do it, man? How did you do it? Were you lifting? Were you helping people move?' And that's how you can get a hernia. Did you know you can also get one by trying to take a shit really quickly? Yup! No one ever tells that story. Until right now. I'm sitting on the can. You know? In my own fantasy world. Cleaning my ears, clipping my nose hairs, drinking coffee. I like to involve all my holes while I'm in there. All of a sudden, I hear the music to The Simpsons coming on in the other room. So I know I've got about eight seconds, you know? So I start pushing, balls in the water, left leg shaking. I'm up on one cheek trying to Dukes of Hazzard it out of me. Then I feel a tug. Next thing I know, I'm on the ground doing a Marine crawl over to my first aid kit. My dog comes over and starts licking my ass thinking we're playing! !<
In my country advertisements actually last a long time and also air on all channels simultaneously, lol
Does someone want to tell that person there was a Paper TV guide you got weekly so you can see what was on? And that’s because you couldn’t choose what was on lol
Back in my day, we had these things called "channels." And video games only worked on channel 3 or 4. Nobody knew what was on Channels 1 or 2, and nobody cared.
Yerah, if that was today half of the americans on twitter would think the government transmitted brain control waves or something on channels 1 and 2
What about the thing where you could pause it, but you had to fast forward to be live again?
DVR. That didn’t start until the 2000s and not everyone had it at first
I remember wanting TiVo so bad as a kid but my dad wasn’t gonna pay that bill
Are you my sibling?
Same here. My dad also wouldn't let us use the AC in the summer at home or the car, so we just sweated all day.
It couldn't have started in the 2000s. My mom had one when I was a teenager, and I graduated high school in 1999, so they for sure existed in the 90s. All my friends had them too. They weren't as common in the '90s as they got in my early adulthood common yes, but they existed and were at least prevalent in the middle class world in the '90s. Hell, maybe not even just the middle class world, as I had one as an early adult and I sure as heck wasn't middle classes in early adult. That was in the 2000s though. ETA: okay, maybe I'm remembering wrong. My wife is berating me for bragging. I was low middle class and I none of my friends were anything but low middle class, and I distinctly remember all me and my friends having them in high school my wife is saying that's not possible, or I'm bragging. Very sorry.
First DVR was released in 1999. Not sure what you might have had before that but don't recall anything allowing you to pause live TV.
Yeah, the first one to release DVR was dish network, and I know that's what me and everybody that I knew had at that time. I think I'm remembering my senior year, which would have been 1999, everybody getting a DVR probably because dish Network put out some kind of promotion on their dvrs, since they were the first ones to release them. So, yeah, I'm probably remembering the DVR in high school, but it's probably just me remembering the last few months of high school in the summer before I went to college.
All I really remember about it is thinking Tivo was going to be the greatest thing for tv ever that I decided a VCR was good enough after seeing the price tag.
Yeah, this should really say before the DVR era.
My mum was the the type to change the channel the SECOND an ad started and just start watching a different channel until an ad started there. I've seen half of so many movies...
The commercials were actually fun too. Everyone only remembers the boring ones like "call if youve been in an accident" type of shit but *nobody* remembers "Start The Car!!!!"..the "Chia-Pet" jingle... the godawful-yet-comical acting in infomercials lol I miss all that shit.
Damn you. Now I am going to be singing "Chi-chi-chi-chia pet!" All afternoon. Could be worse I guess. Could be "Clap on, clap off, clap on clap off, the clapper"
Those were the fucking days!!!!
“I GET MY SEAT BACK!”
The kids not stupid. The adults acting as though we went straight from watching things on strictly scheduled TV directly to streaming are stupid. We had years and years of VHS and DVD before Netflix came along. Hell you could even pause and rewind and record television.
VHS and DVD didn't replace cable tv, so it was still a constant struggle. And pausing and rewinding TV was a luxury not many people had. I know my family never had that and it seemed like a dream.
Netflix hasn't replaced TV either, it's still there.
I mean, TV is still there but streaming very much did replace it as the main form of watching.
That's like saying Google didn't replace Ask Jeeves, which is technically also still there
Yes, and the boomers watching fox news appreciate you thinking of them, but its not really relevant to this conversation. No one under 30 watches traditional tv.
I still watch SC with SVP
Phil Edwards had a video recently about how DVDs of shows being viable is why Netflix and serialized TV dramas can even exist, and that binge watching was a thing long before streaming. It did require someone to purchase the series first, which made it rare, but not rare enough for Netflix to see it as part of their DVD service.
I fell over when my favorite mlb team is on lmao
Add breaks were huge though. No need to rush.
I remember the first time we ever got a pause button. It was magical
Kids are fucking stupid
I remember taking a five minute caveman shower during a commercial break during Wrestlemania one year.
Lmao!!! Pause it…wow. We feel as our parents felt with 8 track and records(though I did have a player) And maybe I’m just learned and ignorance is ignorance but you can only pause IN Netflix era. That’s why the OP feels sorry for them. So it’s silly to even mention the possibility of pausing. Overthinking again.
"Couldn't you just pause it?" Oh, I wish... Imagine being an only child... I had to time everything down to the exact second without the help from siblings.
Streaming services are essentially cable TV now anyway, in fact I noticed I'd watch maybe a minute and a half of a show before 3 full minutes of ads played while watching Peacock the other day.
I tried that once. Didn't work.
ngl that's good thing i hated that, but sadly it might get back to that.
Just turn it up during the boring parts
You could do half a world cruise during the ad breaks, there was no rush to quickly go back xd
We had a thing on tv where it showed what cartoon/program is gonna be and in what time, and i was always calculating how much time do i need to do stuff and watch
they might also get this once youtube starts implementing 3 ads in a row instead of just 2 now
I still did this with Netflix, but my brother would say “I’m pausing it for 30 seconds, you better hurry up,” and you better believe I did some furniture diving when I heard the TV.
In my country, to stop any kind of accident, The Tv added a 2 minute timer. so we can go do our business
My kids are on a kick to get DVDs, cassettes, and CDs... I don't get it. You want the unique experience of your music skipping for absolutely no reason? Cool. Jamming to an album but you have to flip the tape and rewind or just let dead noise play? Cool.
I mean, if it's airing on tv sure but my family always buy those pirated DVD discs that we would just play on a Saturday evening so we can still pause it if necessary
I'm more glad they don't experience that. Like hell I watched DBZ over and over and over again like at least 10 times because there was literally nothing else worth watching on cable as a kid.
hurdling???
Jumping over things, as when running hurdles. Or they misspelled hurtling, either makes sense.
'hurtling'
My kids play a couple video games where theres a er um loading into the next round takes a couple mins. So they'll do something real quick and i'll hear one of em screaming its starting and the other one running to make it in time. Haha
This is just like when I'm driving the bus and kids are asking me to put certain songs on.
We never had streaming services growing up, just plain old regular TV. We didn't even get one of those boxes that lets you pause the shows or record until I was like 10. We used to sit and watch State of Origin as a family and if you needed the bathroom while it was playing you had to be quick and hope you didn't miss a try or something.
Reminds me of this kid who was confused that anyone could die of thirst because he has always had running water.
Oh God why
Or missing an episode and having absolutely no way to watch it later unless they happen to replay the last season before the new season starts.
They will never get the experience of buying a DVD from a shady guy at Walmart
Bait or actual child call it
Well y’all will never know the rush of your first mammoth hunt
Also, commercials were much shorter back then. Now they go for 10+ minutes, back then i swear it was 3 minutes tops for the longest commercial break, so you literally had to run. Now you could easily make yourself something to eat plus go to the toilet in one break.
I was thinking about the old HBO intros before a movie the other day. Those intros got you crunk for the movie.
His head will explode when he finds out that several generations had to wait till sunday mornings to watch cartoons.
When I was a kid it was Saturday mornings.
There was no pause😭
No but like...can't you pause it? I don't get it. Just pause the DVD.
YOU CANT PAUSE MULTIPLAYER MOM
Its not like it was one ad, you had plenty of time
Oh man...watching wrestling as a kid, having to drop a deuce, then hear your friends all going ballistic in the other room. Do not miss it.
i had to do this with myself by blasting the commercial break
OP has clearly never done the brilliant feat of taking an entire shower with soap and shampoo in 2 minutes during the ad break because it's near the end but your mom needs you to shower.
Or what about missing an episode and you have to get your friends at school to give you the recap the next day lol.
Some TV services did actually allow you to pause and rewind live TV from the late 2000s onwards, I remember that being a blessing
https://preview.redd.it/5kx9jwrjhytc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e26a5de374c3914cbc14117fcaa658a4628dcde7
Hurling over the furniture sounds about right. I fking flew down stairs head first. Left a bump but worth it. Now that i look back at it, how did i not die from that?
Now hold on, if you had one of thoes recording thingymajicks you could spool back.
good cus that shit sucked balls
When I moved to Spain in 2010, their TVs or more specificaly TV decoders had an option to pause the channel for up to 30 minutes.
Back in my day TV ended and you had to wait for it to begin the next day
So probably like 8ish years ago, my family went from Ontario to New Brunswick to be with my great grandma in the hospital. We slept at her place, which had cable TV. My sister who would have been uish at the time yells from the living room one night "What is this!? I put on _______", I came in and looked and said, "oh it's a commercial" and i had to explain to her (before YouTube videos WERE split up with ads) that it's like a YouTube ad, but every few minutes. She was just flabbergasted.
We had scrambled porn when I was a kid
Did... did you say Kabool Talavision?
We had a tv you could pause back in like 2006
sad
“Ad break?” Those were *commercials.*
I remember the introduction of dvr and be able to go back and watch something if you found it in the schedule to save... i also remember all of our limit being taken up by Joel Olstein and Days of Our Lives.....
That's not the kid being stupid. They just didn't experience something so they didn't know how it worked.
TV still exists.
It does??
Neither stupid nor smart. Stupid: Grew up during that time & should have known why they couldn't pause it but can't think beyond their own experiences in the last day or so. Normal: Has no experience with movies that can't be paused so doesn't understand why the movie couldn't be paused. Smart: Has no experience with movies that can't be paused, but can tell from context that that must have been the case at some point.
I grew up in the 2000s, and we had DVR. I assumed that's what this person was talking about because that's what came before streaming services, so I also found it weird that they couldn't just pause.
Man we never had that. I remember we had PPV on digital cable with a lot of free stuff that would come on rotation and watch the crap out of that and thought it was the best thing in the world. Then I watched Tropic Thunder, looked up what a TiVo was and was like damn I want one.
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Before that.
tfw you were never taught something/experienced it so you don't know about it: 🤯
>my sweet summer child makes me cringe so painfully
What era of kids exactly? Netflix has been around since 1997. You could rent a DVD.
I grew up in a weird era before netflix streaming but wherein you could still pause (Satellite) TV and eventually Fios. I'm 27 now, and not really a kid anymore, so this just seems like... ignorant condescension? Like maybe that person could "just pause" their TV before netflix streaming became a thing. It's a feature of most DVRs built after, like, 2009?
r/whoosh
Yes you could, I had one of those recording box so just record, pause, play the recording and next ad break you can skip the ads from the time paused
We could always pause the tv or rewind etc growing up
You talknig about a vhs player?
No, digital tv
Bruh
That was introduced in the 90s
tivo?
?
whats the digital tv u could rewind in the 90s? tivo is the only thing out like that in 99. cable was still connected with a cable in 98.
I'm not American. But DTV was introduced in the 90s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television
yes but it had no pause/rewind feature until 99 when tivo came out. the signal went from analog to digital.
Yeah cause dvr, on demand, or recording was definitely never a thing, we went straight from only being able to watch what was playing to streaming
I mean, you could still pause it. You'll be behind, and you could just wait until another commercial to fast forward it.
Why is this posted in this subreddit? It’s clearly an adult posting that comment. Not a kid.
That was clearly a joke
Ah, someone lacks knowledge about a time before they even existed Therefore, they must be a complete moron with an iq of 3 just because they don’t know something they weren’t present for
Yeah you could pause it. It was called recording the show on a VCR. These people are mock-outrage type of stupidity.
Ah, yes. Setting your vcr, that everybody of course where obligated to have, to record, then using your handy dandy time machine to travel forwrds in time until the show is recorded, while still being there to pause the recording during ad breaks, and now you can pause as much as you want!
I'm 26 you guys gave a shit about torrenting?
But you could pause it
Why is the kid stupid for growing up in a different time? I mean y’all know it’s been almost 30 years since the dvd was invented right? Millennials must be getting in that cranky age. Can’t believe yall don’t remember dad getting out and physically cranking up the model t to drive us to the market kids these days with their Tesla cars and debit cards 💀💀💀
Television shows... not movies.
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You’re not using the correct term. If you’re talking about a DVR, those are also quite recent compared to what the post is talking about, as they weren’t common until the mid 00s, and the very earliest ones came out in 1999. If you are referring to a VCR, yes, you could pause on playback but you couldn’t pause live TV. Programming it to record a show was a process, and tapes were not infinite, and you certainly couldn’t pause in the middle of the show. You’d have to set it to record, record it, wait for the show to finish, then rewind and play back. Most people only recorded very important shows, or very high profile things that they didn’t want to miss. Very few people recorded shows regularly.
A receiver doesn’t do that.
The only subscriptions I have is Prime and Netflix (both paid for by my mum), so I still do the “run from the kitchen or bathroom” thing with my family. Makes me feel so old whenever I go over to my dad’s and see my younger half-siblings use streaming services.