Why streaming ads so much worse than traditional ones

We all need to stop getting mad about the fact that our favorite streaming series are now full of ads and focus on how awful those ads are.

Yes, it is infuriating that streaming platforms sold a product they could not reasonably hope to sustain. The promise that, for a small fee, viewers would be granted instant access to a vast array of TV series and movies that they could watch when and where they desired, all at once and without the irritant of commercial breaks, seemed too good to be true.

Which, of course, it was. Having lured millions of viewers away from cable and broadcast television, subscription services were first able to raise their rates and then, on top of that, introduce advertising. Far from freeing us from commercials, they now demand, just like cable, that we pay for the honor of watching them.

Judging from recent reports, millions of new subscribers to Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max are OK with that. According to the research firm Antenna, ad-supported subscriptions hit 100 million this year; according to Omar Karim, director of brand and video products for Amazon, that number will double by 2027. (Free ad-supported streamers like Tubi and Pluto TV are also seeing remarkable growth.)

Commercial-free viewing is still possible for a higher-priced rate. But like business class on planes and Magic Key passes at Disneyland, those tiers may become a VIP experience (i.e., absurdly expensive), if they don’t vanish altogether.

With the cost of multiple streaming services already outstripping the much-maligned price of the cable bundle, ads on streaming are here to stay and will, no doubt, be increasing.

So instead of wasting perfectly good outrage over the fact that, once again, a few technocrats have managed to get very rich by destroying the economy of a billion-dollar industry only to return to that industry’s own earlier business plan, let’s focus on the ad-supported streaming experience.

Which is universally terrible.

It’s not just that so many of the spots are low-rent — and we are beyond being surprised by the graphic symptom/side-effect description of pharmaceutical ads — it’s that they are often repeated several times during a program.

For a single hour’s viewing, this would be an annoyance. But streaming was built on the binge, which means a person can see the same damn truck commercial a dozen times in a single sitting.

At which point it feels less like advertising and more like brainwashing, with the unintentional effect of ensuring that if I were in the market for a truck, I would literally buy any other model than the one that was “Clockwork Orange”-d on me while I was trying to watch a murder-mystery series.

Or, God forbid, a movie. If anything sends viewers back to the cineplex, it will be ads for depression meds in the middle of a rom-com or a sophisticated chase scene.

And when I say middle, I mean middle. Subscription streaming was not built for ads and it shows: On Netflix, Prime Video and others, ads will more than occasionally appear midscene, often cutting off dialogue and almost always providing maximum narrative disruption.

This is especially true for streaming shows made before ad-supported streaming became commonplace. In the old days, writers fashioned scripts to accommodate ads with scene breaks and fade-outs. Streaming promised to free them from this, which is one reason so many writers ran around calling television “long form” and claiming each season was like shooting a 10-hour movie.

Imagine watching a 10-hour movie with commercial breaks shoved in every 15 minutes or so. Not great, Bob.

And it’s not like you can fast-forward through them. We willingly relinquished the power of the DVR, which, when wielded properly, was essentially a DIY ad-free streamer, and put ourselves in the hands of people who think having a little countdown clock telling you how long the ads will last somehow makes up for the fact that they just interrupted a monologue.

Again, it is difficult not to instantly hate whatever is being advertised, which, as I understand it, is not the point of any commercial.

Even if you pay for the ad-free tier, series are often interrupted by weird little blips where, presumably, ads appear in economy seating.

Presumably, creators are now factoring in the need for ads, but the current rhythm of streaming ads is maddeningly inconsistent — sometimes there are a bunch of spots at the beginning, sometimes wedged in the middle, sometimes scattered throughout. How’s a writer supposed to cope with that?

One can only hope that these are growing pains, that as with early dubbing fiascoes, the streaming services will realize that writing and editing around commercials is an art form in itself. Film and video editors and postproduction teams have a long history of prepping theatrical films for presentation on ad-supported television. For the love of God, hire professionals.

According to Ad Age, this is the year to invest in streaming. Given the information-sharing and consumer-targeting tendencies of the digital universe, this is a bit worrisome — no one needs their last Amazon search for, say, pimple patches following them around as they try to watch “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” But presumably, more advertisers will force the variety and quality of the ads and ad placement to improve.

At this point, unless we’re willing to fork over more and more money to chase the dream that once was streaming, that’s the best we can hope for.