I dont think anyone is saying you need to watch closely or even look at the ads?? Somehow a lot of people have come to attack a straw man regarding control of your eyeballs/behavior. Dont look at the ads if you dont want.

The issue here is payment to the content creators. If you mute your tv, the actors/writers/producers/camerapersons/tv station employees/etc get paid. If you block ads on the internet, then the writers/journalists/photographers/sysadmins/etc dont get paid, even though they made you happy, or provided something you obviously valued. I mean, you spent your valuable time consuming it, it must be worth something.

No, I wouldn't demand anything, and there is nothing wrong with any of that in the slightest to me.

But if you setup a program to explicitly skip every commercial break without any interaction from your part, then it would be a problem to me.

So it's the automation itself that bothers you? If I kept uBlock origin installed but told it to block nothing by default and then went through and manually clicked block on every ad on a new page you'd be okay?

So as long as you either see the ads, or are inconvenienced by them, it's OK?

How about if my friend hits the mute button for me?

How about if my friend is an android?

a while back I had an idea for an "auto-muter", which would look up audio fingerprints for commercials like shazam does for music. When it identifies a commercial, it emits the MUTE button from an IR transmitter for the prescribed duration of the commercial. Like a poor-mans TIVO. I never built it but all the pieces are already out there.

That's the thing I don't get. Automating an action does not in any way take a previously moral action and make it immoral. That's not how ethics and morals work.

I get that you _feel_ differently about it, and that's totally ok, but the idea that you feel the need to suggest that those feelings are "right" for others baffles me.