You're right, it's shocking, although I think it's mainly during sports (which sports nerds already pay a fortune for to subscribe to sky sports / bt sport).

The vast majority of TV viewing in the UK is on BBC, amazon prime, netflix or disney plus, and thus doesn't contain commercials, just adverts for other shows from the same provider. The rest of the stuff is mainly aimed at old people sat at home - visited my nan today, who had some terrible channel on (channel 65 or something). Adverts were almost entirely for stairlifts and to leave money to charities in wills.

That doesn't sound so dissimilar to the US :)

Ads during the day are either for old people or stay at home moms.

The only reason sports gambling isn't as big (or bigger) in the US is due to a historical aversion to gambling (thinly veiled piety in government), and because Major league sports orgs are still figuring out how to get the most money out of it.

Sports gambling is now quite large in states that have allowed it since the SCOTUS case a year or so ago. Still not a lot of TV ads though, more web advertising.

UK sports (or sports TV at least) is very tightly linked to gambling. Many football teams are sponsored by gambling companies.

About 15 years ago there was a huge debate about whether we should allow “American-style” supercasinos but we just did it through sport instead.

As an American we may not want to be throwing the proverbial stone in that glass house

To be fair, I think their point in this case is many countries are in proverbial glass houses, some stronger than others.

Exactly.