>now has commercials

Commercials had invaded Cable TV thoroughly, well before the 2000s. I know it was 20 years ago, but I'd be surprised for someone to forget about the existence of commercials.

Today's are much more intrusive, however.

My daughters only experience with linear television programming is in lobbies and my families houses for the holidays/visiting grandpa. It’s interesting to watch a generation grow up that literally doesn’t know what traditional TV looks like, and I’m fucking glad because it sucked.

Too bad new issues of content fragmentation are developing in its place - I’m at least thankful Apple is starting to tackle it with “channels” in the Apple TV app and hardware, I still have to juggle subscriptions but at least I have a consistent interface to all of them.

What do you mean, content fragmentation? You just search for what you want to watch on Telegram and pick your preferred resolution for your device and bandwidth. As an added bonus, there's usually better localization available, too!

could be an area thing, but I certainly never had a show or movie interrupted in order to play a commercial. They would do the small commercials in between programs to let you know some show or movie was available to watch, but that's not my understanding of commercials as they exist today on cable.

I feel the same way when I browse the web with ads...

When I install a new OS what I do goes in this order.

1. start OS updates

2. install FF if it's not installed (aka if its windows)

3. install ublock origin

I'm grateful there are people who take the hit and keep the internet free for people like me, but I could never deal with those ads.

Cable always had commercials, not sure what special cable you recall having, but Comcast was full of commercials 20 years ago.