82% of Kids in 'Netflix Only' Homes Have No Idea What Commercials Are (exstreamist.com) 301
Two anonymous readers share a report: We decided to survey parents of young children (below 10 years old) to see how many kids in "Netflix only" homes knew what commercials are, compared to those homes who watch regular television. We surveyed 100 parents (50 Netflix-only homes, 50 normal television homes), here were their responses: 82% of kids in Netflix only homes don't know what commercials are. 38% of kids in regular television homes don't know what commercials are.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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What? Cable TV was almost never "commercial free" except for maybe 5 minutes at the dawn of the cable channel industry.
My first sighting of cable TV in suburban Minneapolis showed commercials on the "cable" channels.
And of course re-transmitted over the air channels always had commercials because it was just a closed-circuit feed of the OTA signal.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Premium channels than and now were commercial free, but if there were bundled "cable channels" that were commercial free it was for a very short window of time. I don't know if cable systems sent HBO out to subscribers for free in the early days. They certainly never re-transmitted local channels commercial free.
The *amount* of commercials has grown over time, I do remember there being fewer commercials on cable channels -- but channels like MTV were never commercial free AFAIK, and this goes back to circ
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
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You're quite mistaken here.
CATV, or Community Antenna TeleVision, was literally exactly that: Effectively a big long antenna that allowed reception of channels that were otherwise out of your geographical reach, and this concept was later extended to bring "superstations" like WGN and WTBS to more markets than just their home market. Nonetheless, these channels were never without commercials until the concept was even further extended to include content that wasn't broadcast anywhere and could only be seen
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I've travelling this week and the place I'm staying only has OTA TV. We tried turning it on. It's a wasteland.
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I travel about 230 days each year. I might turn the hotel television on once or twice in a month. Television is unwatchable these days.
Depends where you Travel To (Score:3)
I might turn the hotel television on once or twice in a month. Television is unwatchable these days.
It depends on where you travel to. US television is indeed unwatchable due to the ad breaks but if you happen to visit Europe and they have the BBC channels those are entirely ad free and even the commercial UK channels only have 2 breaks per 1 hour programme (or one per 30 minute programme).
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It depends on how you look at it.
If you're used to satellite TV or Netflix - yeah, it's pretty barren. Compared to what WAS available though, in the modern age there's a lot more channels available then "back in the day".
Since the mid 1990's the amount of over the air channels available here has more than tripled (5 channels to now 16). I mostly stick to Netflix but I do occasionally use the OTA antenna for things like football games and such.
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What? Cable TV was almost never "commercial free" except for maybe 5 minutes at the dawn of the cable channel industry.
The "premium" Cable TV channels (HBO, Cinemax, etc.) were indeed commercial free for some time, at least in the market where my family was served (SouthernCalifornia). That was one of the major draws of watching movies on Cable versus broadcast TV. I don't remember how long it took for commercials to appear, but (according to my infallible memory), it seemed like a number of years.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
The premium TV channels are still commercial free (except for some between-program ads for other shows/movies on the same channel; which are primarily used to fluff out movie times so they start/end at roundish numbers.)
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That was the *promise* of cable TV, but the rebroadcast terrestrial stations would *never* have been commercial free due to all manner of contractual obligations to run advertising.
I'll admit not having an encyclopedia of cable stations, but when I first watched cable in 1983 the non-premium channels had commercials. Maybe less than now, but still they had them. WGN was always a commercial-filled operation.
Regardless of whether the very small handful of "cable only" channels were actually commercial free
57 channels and nothing on came out in the 80's (Score:2)
no early cable tv was local OTA channels (Score:2)
no early cable tv was local OTA channels in areas with poor pick up. Super stations came later on as well stuff like HBO.
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
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And didn't you? I know I did. Thanks goodness for the advent of the Commodore 64.
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Thanks goodness for the advent of the Commodore 64.
We used to dream of having a C64. My family was so poor, we had to write our BASIC programs on a Timex/Sinclair ZX80.
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Disks! Pffft!
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Thanks goodness for the advent of the Commodore 64.
I went through three Commodore 64's from middle school through college in ten years. Although I had a near letter quality dot matrix printer with Commodore and Centronic connectors, I was still required to use a typewriter for my reports. I had that printer for 20 years before I replaced it with an inkjet printer in 2005.
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So that's why I'm wealthy. I still have my Apple //e. I upgraded recently from a ][+
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I still have my Apple //e. I upgraded recently from a ][+
That was a school fad back in the 1980's. Every school had Apple ][ with dual floppy drives and monitor. Richer families spent $2,500 on that setup. Poorer families went for the cheaper $250 Atari, Commodore or TI computers.
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Once you get above a certain income level, you start seeing any one less wealthy than you as "poor".
Nope. Probably because I'm regarded as "poor" because I enjoy working in IT Support, make $50K per year and live in Silicon Valley. Should I piss on others who make less than me because I'm pissed on by others who are "rich" than me?
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I didn't get cable or my first computer until 8th grade.
I personally never had cable, in part, because I stopped watching television 30+ years ago. Although I had a Commodore 64 as a teenager, I didn't get my first PC until a roommate brought home a surplus IBM AT to get me to stop playing with his shiny new 386. As limited as the 286 was, I ran a WildCat! BBS off that system for a year while in college.
Good or not? (Score:5, Interesting)
Without having commercials to teach you that companies consider you a never-ending open wallet, and that they WILL lie to you to get your money, will these Netflix-only kids grow up to be or more less naive about the honesty of other people and companies?
Re:Good or not? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have the same worry with my kids, who don't even know how to control the FIOS part of the TV. But I also find the irony of wondering if television commercials are good for kids quite amusing.
WELCOME TO TEH FUTAR! (Score:2)
Netflix-only kids don't know what commercials are
build Utopia, and people will pay $8.99/month to live there.
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Imagine if you will, a society that successfully eliminates con-men for a time. They have a "tough on lies" stance, or lock down the currency, or no one has anything to steal. Whatever reason, you have a generation of people who have never been flim-flammed, cheated, lied to, stolen from, and/or welshed. And then things change, as they do, and now con-men are introduced to the populous. They are liars in a society full of trust. Imagine that clusterfuck.
So, is the inverse true? Let's say we had some so
Re:Good or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without having commercials to teach you that companies consider you a never-ending open wallet
You must not watch very many recent movies or television shows. They movies/shows have become the commercials: product placement.
In same cases, the movies have essentially become mildly entertaining infomercials for kids (e.g,. the Lego movies). In other cases, the movie is a way to get kids to want the inevitable avalanche of associated merchandise. Kids didn't need commercials to know that they wanted the Frozen lunch box or the Cars backpack. To quote the wise Yogurt, "merchandising, it's all in the merchandising" (you will have to imagine the funny accent).
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I found with my kids, they actually just seemed to want to less stuff than a lot of kids their age.
Re:Good or not? (Score:4, Insightful)
I found with my kids, they actually just seemed to want to less stuff than a lot of kids their age.
My kids are the same. I asked them what they wanted for Christmas, and they said they already had nice laptops and phones, and didn't really need anything else. When I was a kid, my "wanted" list filled several pages.
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iTunes gift cards and Steam gift cards will go a LONG way today.
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I don't think this is anything new. When I was a kid, it was actually more blatant with He-Man, GI-Joe, Thundecats, TMNT, and other shows basically existing only to promote the toys. Going back and watching those shows was almost painful. The quality was so bad. And we watched it anyway because there really wasn't much else on TV.
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It depends on when you were a kid. I was a college student in the 90s. But kids growing up in the 90s - early 2000s had some quality animated television that ages pretty well - Batman:TAS and the related D.C. Shows, Animaniacs, DuckTales, Pinky and the Brain, Tiny Toons, etc.
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Re:Good or not? (Score:4, Interesting)
My favorite show as a kid was The Transformers. If we're to be honest it was first and foremost a half hour commercial for the Hasbro toy line. This is nothing new.
The reason Pebbles, daughter of Fred and Wilma Flinstone, was a girl rather than a boy was because the producer noted that girl dolls sell better than boy dolls. That was 1962. There's nothing new here.
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You must not watch very many recent movies or television shows. They movies/shows have become the commercials: product placement.
I'm sure that would NEVER [youtu.be] happen.
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We're a mostly PBS and Netflix home, so they don't see many commercials. However, they do see them when we watch live sports. I make sure to point out that ads are lies that are trying to trick you into buying their products. Sometimes we even talk about how a particular ad is trying to appeal to you.
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Well, my kid sure didn't like hearing their messages at least. When my son was 3 his only exposure to video had been nature documentaries and sesame street on Netflix. Then one day he paid attention to some show my wife and I were watching on Hulu, a commercial came on and he screamed "I DON'T LIKE THIS SHOW CHANGE IT!" So at least he developed "disgust for advertising" at an early age.
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I suspect they'll be less naive as to the dangers of commercials, but also more affected by the commercials that they do see, which is what my own experience has been up to this point. I cut the cord years ago and have had ad-blockers installed for even longer, so I've been away from commercials for long enough to grow used to their absence. When I do see an ad, the following seems to be true:
- I'm no longer ad-blind, so (for better or worse) I pay a lot more attention to them when I do see them
- The ones I
That's not how it works (Score:2)
How long before Netflix adds commercials? (Score:2)
I mean really, its like its all starting over again? How long before Netflix and other streaming companies add commercials? CableTV started as a Pay TV with no commercials, and then added them when they wanted to more revenue...
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I must be older than you. Cable started out as a simple rebroadcast over wire system, and the pay TV channels came later.
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My home town in Kansas always had great reception for OTA because the terrain is fairly flat and unobstructed so we didn't get cable until the mid 80s after they had added pay channels and the population had increased making demand high enough to make it worthwhile. Satellite was popular for remote areas that couldn't get cable around that time as well but the nearby city had cable since maybe the 60s.
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Most people forget the very early days of what cable TV was. There's a common short form you'll see on the back of old TVs where the cable plugged in. It was CATV. This stood for Community Access Television or Community Antenna Television. Basically, in areas with poor reception, they would build one giant antenna to get really good reception, and then put a cable to each person's house so that they could get reception of the channels that were coming over the air for free.
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Not exactly. OTA Channels are there because the FCC mandates they be carried by your cable system. It's part of the rules that let them exist.
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Netflix already has commercials, sort of. Many of Netflix's shows have been doing product placements of things like Apple products for years now, and they have advertising for certain shows built into the home page of their web site and applications. Surely you must have noticed that Netflix always promotes their own shows before they show other content now.
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Illegal downloads?
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The last time I went to a theater, it was only ads for other upcoming movies. That's a little different from typical TV commercials.
Regardless, if Netflix does bring back commercials, look for torrenting to rise again, perhaps in a slightly different, harder-to-track form. The cat's out of the bag now; people are putting up with the paid stuff (Netflix, streaming music services) now because it's very convenient and ad-free for a comparatively low monthly price. Stick ads back in it and that's going to fa
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only ads for upcoming movies?
Either your location is very different from mine, or you arrived late to the movie.
I remember a time when theatres had a curtain that was closed when you walked in to the theatre, and only opened at the time the show was supposed to start. Depending on the movie, the show would start immediately, or 1 (maybe 2, but not normally) movie trailer would play, and then the show would start.
Now the theatres don't have a curtain, because they want the screen showing ads the moment you w
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Either your location is very different from mine, or you arrived late to the movie.
I came right on time, or maybe slightly late, I forget exactly. I wasn't early.
Yes, I've been to movies in the past where if you got there pretty early, you had to sit though a bunch of stupid ads. The lesson here: don't get there early. If you're going there early to get better seats, the problem is that there's too many people, which is a big problem all by itself; you need to wait until the movie has been out a while and
I've forgotten too (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't forgotten commercials entirely, but I've forgotten what they are like, and they are super annoying. Last time I stayed in a hotel, I flipped on TV and tried to watch a show -- I didn't make it past the first half of the show before I flipped off the TV and went to my laptop to watch Netflix because I couldn't stand the ads.
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Only Comment (Score:5, Interesting)
The only comment on the article's page is very accurate: "META: this article is a commercial for Netflix."
I call BS (Score:3)
We surveyed 100 parents (50 Netflix-only homes, 50 normal television homes),
So an incredibly non-scientific tiny sample size, not at all representative of the population at large.
38% of kids in regular television homes don't know what commercials are.
I call bullshit on this one. There is no way you can actually watch cable TV and not know what a commercial is. Even with a DVR you'll still see them.
Re:I call BS (Score:4, Insightful)
I call bullshit on this one. There is no way you can actually watch cable TV and not know what a commercial is. Even with a DVR you'll still see them.
Keep in mind that we are talking about kids under ten. If nobody explained to them what a commercial is it is very likely that they see it as normal TV show.
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when my kids were three, and they saw their first commercials they said "we hate 'mercials!" since we mostly would watch DVDs or on demand. (Dis Jr. on demand is pretty much commercial free)
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Yup! Even the few seconds between the start of the commercial break and the time I hit the FF button hard enough to hurt my finger is annoying. Plus it takes me out of the "moment" of the show I'm watching.
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Double WTF: do these kids really watch NOTHING but netflix, and never watch anything on, oh, for example, youtube?
Doesn't seem hugely credible.
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Maybe their parents installed an adblocker?
True, but at that point it's really not representative at all. Also, are there adblockers which work with the youtube apps?
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The sample size is not a problem. The p-value for there being a delta between the homes is <0.001
Now, the sampling may have not been scientific or random, but you haven't shown that at all.
38% of kids not knowing what a commercial is called is different from not knowing what one is.
On the other hand.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:On the other hand.. (Score:5, Funny)
Stats? (Score:2)
Re:Stats? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree that the sample size is too small. But anecdotal, I think there is some merit to this. While I'm not sure the number is 82%, I know that my children cannot complete common slogans that are second nature to us kids growing up in the dark ages.
Limited media experience (Score:2)
Sounds kinda sad that those kids have never experienced Youtube and other free media sources.
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Commercials on Youtube??? What kind of Philistine doesn't use adblock or whatever. I don't think I've seen a commercial on Youtube within this decade that wasn't actually the content I was looking for.
Almost sounds like my kids (Score:5, Interesting)
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On the radio stations I listen to, I've learned about how long the breaks are, and I turn the damn thing off for the commercials and turn it back on about the time the break ends.
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My children are in the same boat; however, they do NOT like commercials or the inability to pick and choose what they're going to watch at whatever moment.
When we travel we now take our Roku w/us b/c even with PBS, they're annoyed by the reality of traditional TV telling its viewers what they're going to watch and when.
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The same goes for new products - you often wouldn't know they existed without
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Maybe a good thing... (Score:2)
...considering that watching commercials makes you stupid...
PBS, anybody? (Score:2)
PBS doesn't generally have advertisements during kid's shows... Sesame Street doesn't have ads.
I don't recall bullshit studies about kids not recognizing commercials due to their kids watching Sesame Street, Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood, or any of the other legion of PBS shows for kids.
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Not many households are PBS only. The kids can see the ads blaring on the shows their parents watch. Yet another reason they don't want to grow up.
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PBS may not have ads during their shows, but they DO have advertisements. They play a lot of ads actually between shows and all the entities that donated to support the shows in the opening and closing credits.. It may get some of it's support from the government, but it still runs advertisements of sorts.
Don't get me started on the donation drives....
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PBS doesn't generally have advertisements during kid's shows... Sesame Street doesn't have ads.
Sesame Street is almost 100% product placement for Sesame Street licensed toys and other merchandise,
Kids shows are commercials (Score:3)
They may not know what the term "commercial" is but they're endlessly exposed to commercials. The entire basis of kids programming is to sell toys.
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The entire basis of kids programming is to sell toys.
For the most part, that is correct. One shining exception to that rule is, "Trollhunters," which may very well be the single best "children's show" ever created.
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Trollhunters was okay, but have you seen the new Netflix Voltron series? It's phenomenal. Story, art, voice acting, whole package.
YouTube is filled with ads... (Score:5, Informative)
YouTube videos are smothered in ads and kids experience them all the time. Netflix shows are also rife with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) product placements. Live action shows feature massive luxury homes, Macbooks everywhere, fancy cars and shiny mobile phones. All that stuff acts to normalize expectations. It is brilliant and very effective marketing.
The scary part (Score:4, Informative)
38% of kids in regular television homes don't know what commercials are
. I am sure these kids will grow up and learn what a commercial is, but considering the amount of commercial on American TV it is hard to believe that they have not been heavily exposed to those.
B.S. (Score:2)
Alternative headline? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that the more surprising figure? 2/5 kids in a typical home (which has a TV which children watch ~24hrs/week) don't know what a commercial *is*. Oh, I see, the question was to the parents, "Do your kids know what commercials are?" -- This is a survey on parents' opinion about what their kids 'know'. The headline maybe should read "82% of Exstreamist readers who are parents in netflix-only homes think their kids don't know what commercials are" because technically that's all they've indicated.
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Here's the scary question for that stat:
Assuming the number is accurate (for some values of accurate), do they not know what a commercial is because they have never seen one or because they cannot differentiate the commercial from the show they are watching?
I innoculate my kid against commercials (Score:2)
We're a Netflix-only household. My kid almost never sees commercials there. But I don't want him to not know what they are because I don't want him to fall prey to the tactics advertisers use. So whenever we do run across commercials (at the movies, at grandmas house, etc.), we often talk about them with respect to issues of truth, opinion, spin, manipulation, and reasons to buy.
I would not be happy for my kid to be one of the 82% who don't even know what a commercial is.
What a suprise.... (Score:2)
So kids that only see Netflix don't know about commercials.... Let me guess, they don't know about rotary dial phones, phonograph records or cassette tapes either because they've never see them..
What a surprise.. I think I'm going to have a heart attack and die from THAT surprise...
The definition is changing. (Score:2)
The slow pan past a Lexus in Suits is a commercial.
http://www.lexusnxforum.com/fo... [lexusnxforum.com]
Seen the same (Score:2)
A few years back when my boy was 4 or so, he experienced his first commercial. He had been watching YouTube on computers and Kodi for his first few years, so no commercials. Then we got a tablet and he watched YouTube through the app, which gave him his first commercial. "I don't want this", he tells me. Sorry guy, you just gotta wait.
His little sister would just keep clicking videos until she got one without a pre-roll or the commercial was vaguely interesting. She often assumed she just clicked on th
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A sample size of 100 is more than adequate. Why wouldn't it be?