Dropped $40 on a premium Crunchyroll subscription and still got hit with midroll ads during the season finale of that new mecha show.

I paid for the ad-free tier specifically to avoid interruptions during epic fights and it still shoved a commercial for some mobile game right when the pilot was about to eject, has anyone else had this happen with their streaming service?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamie77011d ago

My buddy actually had this same thing happen but with a different service, he was watching a cooking competition where the final plating was happening and boom, a full on commercial for frozen pizza hit right in the middle. He called customer support and they told him it was a "targeted content enhancement" which is just fancy talk for shoving ads in your face after you already paid. Makes you wonder if these companies even know what ad-free means anymore, like they'll just keep pushing until someone calls them out on it.

thompson.reese11d ago

Saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone tested this with a network monitor and found the ads were actually injected by the streaming app itself not a glitch. Guess they figure most people won't notice or complain if it's just a short ad during the climax. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of paying extra though if they're still sneaking them in.

black.jake10d ago

That's a good point, but I think it's worth being a little more specific about what you're calling a "network monitor." Most people don't have the tools to actually trace where an ad packet originates on their home network. What that person probably used was something like a DNS sniffer or a packet capture tool like Wireshark, which is a bit more advanced. Still, you're right that the end result is the same - the streaming app is calling home to an ad server and injecting that content right into the video stream. It's not a glitch in the pipes, it's a feature they built on purpose. They count on folks not raising a stink because it's only a few seconds, but that's exactly how they get away with it.