Considering that, effectively, you could push one button and normalize volume across the board, one has to assume you punch up the volume during the ads just to piss me off. Gotta make sure we can hear your message while we’re doing anything we’ve been putting off during the brief intermission between ad breaks, right?

But common sense says that if you crank the volume during the ad breaks, your audience will just hit mute. I know I do. You think we will not do this because we don’t want to miss our show when it comes back, or we will end up paying even closer attention than we would otherwise, but the fact is we just miss the first few seconds and hate you even more.

My point is that, rather than placating your advertisers, you are merely digging yourself deeper. A short-term solution that was dead at birth.

You need to be far, far more acutely aware that you are competing with Tivo & the Interwebs. We don’t have to watch your ads at all.

So play nice. Or we will stop showing up at game time.

The ISP business in North America is all kinds of shady. They half-ass the upgrades and paint all sorts of floweriness in advertising and generally piss all over us. The fact is that they are not meeting demand, and really hope we won’t notice.

So when they offer us super-mega fast connection speeds, all it takes is a swing through Speedtest.net to see that a bronzed piece of shit is still a piece of shit. My biggest complaint is that when Shaw advertises up to 25 Mbps downstream, they aren’t mentioning that to get that speed you would have to be the only one using your shared pipe, which is normally shared by seventy-five or so other connections. I rarely see more than 800 kbps on my 7.5 Mbps line. I’ve certainly never seen 2 Mbps. Telus lines are not shared the same way, but they still suffer from a lot of noise that slows you down anyway.

(shamelessly stolen from Penny Arcade)

If I had a lot of scratch, I would contract with cities and municipalities to build the infrastructure for a fibre network and lease it to the ISPs. And yes, with all that bandwidth, I would work with cities to offer free wi-fi (at a throttled rate to protect the nicely co-operative ISPs).

Fibre is the future (and has been since 1986), and they should stop fucking around.