It's crap

I think Australia is second only to the US for amount of ads shown

I cant remember the movie we were watching but after awhile we started timing the gap between ads and it was LESS than 5 minutes, how on earth can that be justified? At least attempt to make the ads watchable, they have just again blindly followed America unfortunately.

We struggle to get 2mb on a good day. It's usually around the 1.2mb mark

Not cool

Tell me about it. No chance of it improving until/if the NBN gets here which isn't expected until 2016 IIRC

Commercial TV in Australia is mind-numbing. I don't know how any people can bear to watch it, it just gives me a compelling urge to throw the telly out of the window. The worst is when they had an advertisement break before the last 10 seconds of a show.

Thank god for streaming video

Oh come on everyone, lighten up, the River boys are the most beautiful thing on tv, who doesn't love a good aussie bogan boy to look at at the end of a stressful day.

I've noticed an increasing number of news websites wanting payment to read. Sydney Morning Herald is one. They give you ten articles then hit you up for payment. So I actually don't want to pay because they bombard you with advertising anyway. If there were no ads then I might consider it.

So here's the trick. Get the Chrome brower and use the Igcognito Tab. No cookies get put on tour system. The website has no ability to know how many times you've been there.

Thanks very much for the tip. I visit The Age site regularly and get the frozen screen after I access 10 articles in a calendar month. What I've been doing up until now once I got to my 10 articles on The Age site is visiting the 'sister' Fairfax websites -SMH, Canberra Times and WA Today which effectively gives 40 articles per month but of course some Melbourne specific articles sometimes don't appear on the other sites. $15 a month for The Age seems a bit much but most papers now have got on to the lurk of boosting revenues as fewer and fewer people literally buy papers.

I use Firefox rather than Chrome so I'll look for the similar thing you mention. I do have Chrome though and if needs be I'll use it for browsing The Age.

Private Window, same difference.

Murdoch is the source of all ills.

Yes, tried Private Window (already over the 10 Age articles this month); had to log on to BE's (proving it didn't 'remember' my BE cookies), went to the Age site and happily was able to read more articles.

For anyone also using Firefox and not sure, click the menu button (3 horiz lines top right), click on new private window and then either pick your website from bookmarks or type in the URL.

It says employers can still track the sites employees visit, ditto parents with kids and you are still susceptible to viruses etc in Private Window browsing.

Without some sort of paywall or ads how do you think the paper will survive? Journalism doesn't make the money - advertising does.

Answering your question ..... ads.

Therefore I won't be paying to read their site if I'm bombarded with ads.

I know someone who works at Fairfax and they say the payment is something they are trying. They don't care if people go around it. The ads make enough money. Its like a bank fee. If thet can get it, they will take it.

The reason why tv is shit here is simply down to market size. The population is too small to support 3 commercial players. This means they are reduced in quality due to wafer thin margins forcing them to make cheap crap and cram in loads of ads to try to make some money. The same problem applies to the airline industry.

Then throw in massively underfunded public broadcasting and a monopolistic paytv industry and you get the current result. The UK has 40m more people, a tv tax and a small geographical area for transmission which massively keeps down costs. The cost of transmission are extremely high here due to the large number of transmitters and stations required to cover the country.