You just have cable now

The Adpocalypse is upon us.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Maybe DVD box sets were always the answer… —Kate

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Image: ScreenRant

I spent most of Christmas and New Years slowly rotting on some kind of soft surface in front of some kind of screen until one day, when my sister and I were neck deep in holiday movies, I was jolted out of my stupor: “Wait,” I said, sitting up. “Why do we keep getting ads?”

My family cut cable around 10 years ago, opting instead for the emerging market of platforms that not only provided movies and TV shows on-demand, but also—crucially—did not show ads. What began as a luxury, however, has become a necessity: To watch almost anything at all these days requires a subscription to one of seemingly countless streaming services. Because of this, the streaming wars are no longer about winning over customers, but companies seeing how much they can get away with. And it’s working: It took me until December 2023 to realize that the ad-free platforms I regularly enjoy had actually, for the past few years, been showing me…quite a lot of ads.