The diminuendo had even forced the traditional advertising industry to up its game over the decade’s first century. In the long years of prime time’s uncontested sovereignty, and before the remote control, viewers could be expected to sit through commercials or, at worst, go off to get a snack of something they were being shown. The remote had done some damage to that fixity, but now a veritable revolution was relocating real control and choice in the hand of the viewer—at first through DVRs and the effectively unbounded selection of digital channels, and then streaming. Faced with unprecedented competition, advertising, as in the 1980s, was forced to become more intrinsically entertaining in order to have any chance of being effective.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1104