Sssht, you might give them ideas. I am cynical enough to believe that they will add a IR heartrate sensor (a la XBox One Kinect) to 'pause entertainment' when nobody is in the room.

Formulated like that, it even sounds like a feature ;).

Theres a rather convincing episode of Black Mirror about this...

Spotify won't let you mute during adverts and will pause if it detects the system volume drop quickly.

They can't detect the volume on external speakers. But there's no reason why they couldn't with a microphone.

iHeart, at least on Android, will download (using precious cell bandwidth) video ads and play them, during which time it disables the "back" button. You're forced to let the ad play. You can still switch to another app while this is going on, but IIRC you can't turn off the audio part of the ad by doing so. My "solution" when listening to iHeart is to keep the Android settings app running with the iHeart app selected, ready to "Force stop" it.

You joke, but network executives have actually said such things, and there's a long history of them suing and winning against ad-skipping features for TV. Here's just one example: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120525/04185919074/tv-ne...

From a different article that's on the home page at the moment:

"There was a wonderful quote from CBS this autumn that they’re less worried about PVR ad-skipping ‘because people are too busy with their smartphones to bother skipping ads anymore’." - http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/24/tv-mobile-and-...

There is already a concept of TV checking (using Kinect-like stuff) whether you're there watching ads or not. I recall there being news articles about it, and people proposing it were not joking.

Drink verification can.

Or they could make bathrooms without TVs illegal.

Black Mirror, episode Fifteen Million Merits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

The episode was absolutely wonderful (and disturbing). The whole series is worth watching.

BTW. It took me a long time to figure out the meaning of the title of the show.

I'm a little tired, sorry about the typo, been reading that Atari stuff until daylight and still got up at 9 am. So, yes, Black mirror, and it's definitely worth watching though some of it may not for everybody, especially not if you're easily disturbed.