I don’t know about you, but I’m offended by the number of ways companies try to get me to buy something. Years ago, I sat next to a young advertising designer from the Netherlands on a flight aimed at Amsterdam. She saw that I was reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, and for just about the entire overnight flight, we argued about the morality of manipulation. Full of Nietzchean references (and in her mind therefore Heideggerian as well), she talked about how the thrill of her job came from thinking of new ways to manipulate people into caring about consumer products they would not otherwise. If it weren’t for the wine, I would have puked.
The web is just the latest way for sellers to bombard us with offers to buy things we don’t need. I get sick of pop-ups offering me downloads of the latest Britney Spears or 50 Cent video.
So when someone told me there was an ad-free version of RealPlayer, I was curious. The short story is that the BBC is an ad-free media outlet. Because Real Networks wanted to continue working with the BBC to distribute streaming content, Real had to offer an advertisement-free version of their free RealPlayer.
You can get it here.
