The assumption is that not many people would leave the room, close their eyes or mute the ads.
If you created a painless, super easy way to remove all ads, i'm sure that TV channels will also find it hard to sell to advertisers, and thus, their revenue would decrease.
My last CRT TV had a picture in picture mode. When ads started I pressed the PiP button on the remote, placed the channel I was looking at in the PiP window and started watching something else. When the ads were over I came back to that channel or stayed on the other one if I found something more interesting.
I watch TV on my tablet now, streamed from a Raspberry PI with a TV Hat. Again, I activate the popup player, start browsing, maybe checking HN or whatever. I put the volume off. Maybe I start doing something else. The advantage of a tablet is that I can bring it with me wherever I go in my house. The TV, not so much. I rarely switched on my TV in the past two years.
Over here volume boosting is illegal, so instead they DSP ad audio to maximise envelope across all frequency bands.
Since ad sections are your typical break from a program to get to the fridge or toilet or whatever, the DSP transform makes sure you still hear the ads and pick up dialog even when far away from the TV.
Downmixing audio so that you can both hear dialogue and not lose eardrums to music and 'splosions seems to be an intractable decades old problem for the movie industry but it sure as hell been solved a dozen times over by the ad biz.
If you don’t hugely care about the quality it’s easier. Movies also want to use the dynamic range for effect but they sometimes rely on people have better home audio systems than they actually do.
That always felt counterproductive to me. I knew people who did this and they still stared at the adverts. In fact, without the sound, you are probably focusing more on the ads, trying to figure out what is going on.
I would agree, the whole point was to enable conversation without the distraction of the ad sounds. If you're gonna watch the damned things anyway I'm not sure it helped
My grandparents did that, it was one of the principle annoyances I had with visting them as a kid
It was very shocking to go from 75dB to an ambient 30dB or something like that out in the countryside. I'd have much preferred to talk over or zone out over the commercials without the suddenly shocking lack of auditory stimulus!
If you created a painless, super easy way to remove all ads, i'm sure that TV channels will also find it hard to sell to advertisers, and thus, their revenue would decrease.