1999
Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible
(stackdiary.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The last time I remember watching television must've been the early 2000s, and I remember watching a movie on TBS. They used to have commercial blocks every 20 minutes or so, which was a little annoying still, but at this point watching a movie was a commercial break every 5-8 minutes. It wasn't enough to get through a single scene sometimes, which is like somebody snatching a book out of your hand to tell you about products for three minutes as you're mid-chapter.
I started just buying DVDs instead and ended up with a great little library full of movies that I hand picked and all the special features that came with them. If the internet turns into what TV was like in those days, I'll simply start blocking sites that run heavy with ads and only white-list websites that respect an ad-free ecosystem.