I'm in the same position. I cut the cord five years ago and have just been using Apple TV for Netflix.
TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.
> TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying.
The worst part is that TV ads are a major part of shared culture. People watch many different channels and many different shows, but the large ad campaigns transcend those boundaries. They squat in the shared mind-space and instruct everyone that 'buying your kids junk-food will make you a happy family' (or more insidiously 'your parents should buy you junk-food, because that's what happy, normal families do'). I actually saw one today which discouraged you from asking your friends for help, apparently it's better to pay the company to do repairs than go through all the hassle of having to repay a favour. These sort of campaigns beggar belief, either they are ineffective, or they must surely do serious collateral damage to shared values.
I have stopped watching tv about 5 years ago, have multiple blockers on my browsers and I learned to intentionally ignore physical adds(magazines/boards).
I'm glad I'm not the only one. But how do you handle situation? My family usually takes offense, and I can see that I would seem arrogant for doing so. I just don't know how to communicate how intrusive and strident the TV is to me.
Just explain that you can't concentrate on what they're saying with all of that noise, and you can see things out of the corner of your eye that distract you.
I don't have the TV on much at all to be honest. I don't understand the people that have it on all of the time, from waking to sleeping. Some people put it on as "background noise" but that doesn't make sense to me - you might as well tune a radio into FM between the stations for background noise or buy a white/pink noise generator and put that on!
TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.