[habosa]

My favorite bar (The Tempest in SF) shows all the major Bay Area sports games with the volume on. They have an employee quickly flip the audio to music whenever the feed hits a commercial. This is one of the best things about watching sports there, and it's 100% manual.

So what I'm saying is: there's at least one bar in the market for this!

[unraveller]

If TV manufacturers actually cared about the consumers well being they would add one simple feature: A Mute Timeout button that also dimmed the screen expecting high contrast flashing ads, each press extends another 20 seconds or so - that would solve most of the ad issue. Too loud? tap tap tap... 1 min later it eases the audio-visual back up to normal.

This is 1950s tech yet we've never seen it, so much for competition spawning better innovation.