We mostly watch news and sports in my house. So unfortunately, live TV. Occasionally we watch other things. I mute the commercials and browse my phone when they’re on.
But I would love a TV that is smart enough to auto hide & mute every kind of ad. Even little logos on the athletes’ uniforms. Hide the ads on the pitcher’s mound. Hide the billboards and signs in the stadium. Show some cool little generic animation, music video, or slide show during commercial breaks. Hide the damned popup window ads and scrolling ads that some channels do. Remove product placements from movies and shows. Basically make all ads completely vanish.
I recently read Contact(the book by Carl Sagan, still need to watch the movie), which features a tech billionaire who built his wealth doing exactly that. He developed a chip that could block TV commercials, and later one to filter televangelists as well.
For a book that was published in the 80s and set in the late 90s, it’s prescient in a few very specific ways. We weren’t exactly communicating by Portable Telefax in 1999, but adblockers were not far away either.