[didgetmaster]

Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.

[autoexec]

I think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company anything to include, but when somebody gets greedy and starts considering adding ads it would make the idea much less attractive and could force them to look at other ways to enshitify their product.

[Terr_]

> contract provisions that would require the company to

IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.

If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.

If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.

[bluGill]

cable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.

[Kye]

I spent a long time thinking CATV on the back mean Cable TV, not Community Antenna TV.

[manarth]

Huh, and I thought it was short for "Conditional Access TV" – i.e. you needed a subscription of some sort.

TIL.