I would love to see an experiment that randomly granted people Netflix or YouTube Premium, and explore health/wealth/etc. impacts going forward.
This could also be added as feature to existing large scale longitudinal studies.
Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
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Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#142Netflix puts the ads directly inside the shows they control themselves. This way no adblock can censor them, and Netflix can prance around pretending they are saints for not showing ads. Example "Hey let's call an uber" says character A. "I watched X on netflix yesterday" says character B.
I'm guessing you don't have kids and haven't actually experienced the difference. - Netflix has gobs of kids shows (i.e., cartoons) that have zero product placement, at least as far as I can tell. This includes both Netflix originals and the rest. - TV has 6-minute ad breaks every few minutes that are non-stop pitches for toys and other shows. It's unbearable. Even shows on premium networks with some product placemen…
If you've seen my nephew's toy hoard with hundreds of small plastic figurines from Thomas, Paw Patrol, and Daniel Tiger, you wouldn't say there are zero product placements in kids' shows.
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#143400 hours of commercial-watching is not being "saved" If Netflix and other streaming services didn't exist, kids would not be watching 1600 hours of terrestrial TV with ads
Citation needed.
There are plenty of studies showing how kids watch way too much TV or equivalents.
https://www.livestrong.com/article/222032-how-much-tv-does-t...
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#144In a related note, I have come to realize the different levels of quality in children's television:
- Public television shows (PBS) stuff is so lovingly created and charming. You can really tell they had experts and creatives work side by side to craft positive stories. Even if it's not particularly exciting.
- Super-smart and creative shows (like the first couple seasons of Spongebob, or Gravity Falls). Great shows on their own merit, super funny and creative. But they are an art first and not necessarily focused on development. Good at clueing kids in on structuring jokes or references, not much else.
- Bland and harmless. Shows that drive a story or characters, but not necessarily lovingly made or particularly funny. I have found most of the Netflix/Amazon/Hulu stuff falls in here.
- Colorful garbage. It's a lights and noise show, with huge focus on licensing. Cartoons of my era are particularly susceptible to this (Dragonball Z, Yu Gi Oh, Transformers, etc).
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> child play outside by themselves is essentially illegal. No it's not.
I encourage you to google it. People get arrested all around the country for letting their kids play in the park across the street, ride their bike around the block, sit in the car alone at the bank, etc.
The fact that "a handful of people" in "several places" over "the last 20 years" becomes "People get arrested all around the country" like it's an epidemic or something is one of many negative, and one of the worst, things about the internet.
That and the fact that "oh and then the charges were dropped and in some cases local laws changed" is inevitably (I think purposefully) left out.
Reason.com went on a year-long bender of self-promotion and half-truthing about 3 years ago when three women were arrested in three states, claiming that "jack-booted big gubmint was comin to take yer kerdz" and plastered people's pictures and stories on fundraising materials and tried to get people to buy their "free range kids" books, as though three incidents in a country of 300 million was an epidemic.
Of course, the most confusing thing about all of this is that a Venn diagram of "people who think that the government is rounding up mothers all over the country" and "people who immediately, vocally, and vociferously criticize the government for NOT protecting the welfare of children" is a perfect circle.
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Childcare is super expensive. I think there are a ton of people who can’t afford it and use screen time to supplement. It keeps the kid safe in one spot while you can get stuff done. Keep in mind that letting a child play outside by themselves is essentially illegal.
> child play outside by themselves is essentially illegal. No it's not.
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#147While I'm glad that kids in Netflix-only households aren't getting bombarded with advertisements targeted at children the way kids my age were in the 1980s, I can't help but suspect that these ad-free kids need to be exposed to some advertising in an educational context so that they learn to recognize when somebody is trying to con them into buying shit they don't need and probably didn't want in the first place.
They learn / don't learn that skill from kidfluencers on YouTube. From what I've seen with my daughter that's a super-weaponized form of advertising compared to what I grew up in, anyone who survives Ryan and turns out halfway adjusted will have made it through a real crucible.
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#148Worth. Every. Penny. I went to my parents house with my son. He was 4. They turned on cartoons. Then he said, "Dad why'd you change the show? I don't want to watch this." It was a commercial. I had to explain commercials to my son. It was at that moment I realized how much of my tv watching as a kid was commercials.
To be fair, my favorite show growing up was Transformers. So technically even the show itself was a commercial.
Transformers is great advertising - it delivered good entertainment value, it made the toys more fun to play with because your imagination had already seen a bunch of Transformers stories play out.
Contrast this with cable TV ads if you haven't watched cable TV in a while. Annoying, gimmicky, manipulative.
I don't have a problem with commercials on principle - I have a problem with how they're implemented. Banner ads on website that give me good content for free? Great! Informing me there are hot MILFs in my area while I'm pair-programming with my boss? No thanks.
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#149Even if just for my own sanity ... I like the lack of commercials and the resulting stable levels of volume. My kids don't watch a lot of TV / screen time but when they do I want to be able to monitor it, and yet also maintain my own sanity.
Oh my god this! Why is is so hard to balance the audio between commercials and shows?
Re: Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
#150It's true but I don't like how I can't filter content for my son. He's 4yo and is a little prone to act in real life like the characters in the cartoons do and I would like to at least temporarily filter things that have fighting in it (like power rangers) because he tends to fight his classmates (they like it, the teachers give us endless grief about it). No way to do that and it seems like a pretty basic form of co…
We set up a PC with two mirrored video outputs for netflix. One goes to the TV in the living room, and another is VGA over CAT5 to a smaller monitor in the kitchen. Makes monitoring consumption easy.