Commercial breaks in TV only began in the mid-1950s

Evidence

In the late 1950s, the Commander caught a whiff of discontent brewing among television consumers, an annoyance at having to sit through the new commercial breaks that now interrupted nearly every program since NBC had first introduced them in the mid-1950s. So he ordered Zenith’s engineers to devise a way to give people more control over what their televisions were doing—in particular, the power to “tune out annoying commercials.” He wanted, we would say, an ad-blocker. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s larger project on attention industries — the ad-blocker impulse predates the internet by half a century. — connects to: Mid-1950s television achieved the largest simultaneous shared attention in history — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 453
• SEED: The remote control as the first ad-blocker: a historical angle on browser ad-blocking as a hundred-year-old consumer arms race.

Broader Connections

• Mid-1950s television achieved the largest simultaneous shared attention in history #qualifies (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 453