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TV Networks Cutting Back On Commercials (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Cable providers aren't the only ones feeling pressure from cord cutters. The TV networks themselves are losing viewers the same way. A lot of those viewers are going to Netflix and other streaming services, which are often ad-free, or have ad-free options. Now, in an effort to win back that audience (and hang on to the ones who are still around), networks are beginning to cut back on commercial time during their shows. "Time Warner's truTV will cut its ad load in half for prime-time original shows starting late next year, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bewkes said last week on an earnings call. Viacom has recently slashed commercial minutes at its networks, which include Comedy Central and MTV. Earlier this month, Fox said it will offer viewers of its shows on Hulu the option to watch a 30-second interactive ad instead of a typical 2 1/2-minute commercial break. Fox says the shorter ads, which require viewers to engage with them online, are more effective because they guarantee the audience's full attention."
TV shows are now 23 minutes long.
up next: an app for your phone that interacts with all the crap they try to make you watch before they show you any content, then beeps to let you know the actual content is starting.
It gives me time to get coffee or a snack. It's a commercial break after all.
1. How about a third option for online viewing? Voluntary, but allow someone to pay a small amount to watch it ad-free. A micropayment if you will. It's sort of like renting I guess now that I think about it. But it should be priced at the value of the ad you would have seen.
2. I enjoy Adult Swim's commercial format (except for the in-show banners they occasionally have). One break in the middle, although I think it may be getting longer, not shorter, which is a down-side. 3.5 minutes would be fine for the internal, single break.
With all the options available to me, it simply isn't worth it anymore. These cable/tv providers were MORE than happy to screw us for every dime they could when there was no viable option. Now that there is, they are scrambling to get viewers back.
Sorry, but with games, movies, music, and other entertainment options out there, along with Netflix/Amazon video, it's simply not worth it to me to pay a premium.
For those of you swashbuckling types, I suggest an Ubuntu/Sonarr/Couch Potato/Transmission setup.
The networks always cut back on commercials leading into Presidential election years. TV and Radio both reduce commercials and jack up rates because they must offer equal quality time spots to all candidates. As a result, they have to clear out the riff-raff of cheap spots usually filled with "As Seen on TV" and "get rich quick" products in order to have the spots necessary to fulfill both their bread and butter big hitter brands and political ads.
We could eliminate about 75% of the marketing and advertising industry at the bottom of the ocean, and society would benefit substantially, a roughly analogous proportion as the legal profession. No surprise, both are exceptionally well paid professions, with no guarantee of results, which don't require any proof of skill (passing the bar once in life is neither required, nor a particularly notable achievement).
As more and more content producers flock to online services who will actually publish their creations, all tv networks are now switching to a 100% advertising format. Nothing but adverts, all the time.
If only the scifi err syfy channel still had shows after the ads end.
Viacom may need to work on their negotiation skills it's pretty hard to get dropped and replaced by a cable company.
Suddenlink (one of the two cable companies here in town) dropped viacom's network after some rather ridiculous rate hikes.
http://www.tvonmyside.com/
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
And you better damn well sound like you mean it!
TV shows are now 23 minutes long.
There can be only one answer to what they're going to do with the extra time: run miniature infomercials.
TV shows are now 23 minutes long.
Perhaps you should be asking, "How are they fitting in more Ads into those older shows?". They speed up the shows. So, in the future, they'll turn off that speed multiplier.
Currently they're not frequency shifting the sound, I'm sure they'll fix that.
TV shows are now 23 minutes long.
and spread across a hour of time.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I predict that we will begin to see (more?) product placements in TV shows. It's an easy way to defeat cord-cutters and DVR'ers. Hey, they've been doing that in movies for decades.
The networks need to expect to lose about 20-35% of ad revenue, and work their business model around it. Making the ads "higher value" by being more targeted and invasive-- but shorter-- indicates a failure to understand the problem. TV Advertisements now are effectively worthless. While they originally banked on having an impact on 2-5% of viewers, the quantity and pervasiveness of advertising today has completely marginalized its effectiveness and it is down to *maybe* 1-2%.
If they want viewers to be "engaged" with the advertising, it cannot compete with what the viewer actually wants to see. They have maybe 4 minutes of advertisements they can cram in per hour before crossing this threshold. They can play games with mingling product placement and advertisements to increase value, but really that is it.
Good riddance.
Content providers will have to make shows with more that 40 minutes of content per hour ( awh )
Internet killed the video star
I discovered long time ago that I just don't get a cut on the ads I am forced to view in the form of $ paid.
Every time, a person shows up on my door asking me to sign up for some dish or whatever service, I ask that question what my cut on it would be.
Some laugh but all disappear and don't come back.
I think that one of the primary reasons that people are rejecting advertising is that the ads are invasive.
To your average consumer, ads are fine. More than fine, actually, necessary to promote products some people would be otherwise unaware of. Just not INVASIVE ads. Forcing users to engage an ad will have the opposite effect.
EVERY grocery store and various other types of stores I go to have ads as you go in. Easily ignored if unwanted, but helpful if desired. Advertisers have been overloading people causing them to shut down completely. They've been seeking that breaking point, and it is nearly a point of no return now that they are finding it.
The invasiveness of the ads causing people to cord-cut and use things like ad-block are caused by the theory that the ads aren't pushy enough, so instead of a page showing specials as you go in, it's more like a used-car salesman who follows you around the store and WILL NOT SHUT UP!!
No wonder people want to smack them.
Even if TV was commercial free there isn't anything worth watching. It's all laugh tracks and fake "reality".
The networks can only get away with double dipping while there's no real competition. They said "Hey, look! We can charge those suck... er... our valued customers boatloads of money (because we don't offer reasonable a la carte services) AND show them more and more advertisements! Win-win!" That resulted in this:
http://www.latimes.com/enterta...
Oops. How about that? Shitting on your customers mean they go elsewhere if there's any chance. No way I'm ever subscribing to cable or any ad-laden service again. I've experienced ad-free on-demand TV, and I'm not going back.
The moment a service starts annoying me with some sort of interactive ad crap, they're gone. At least for me. Maybe it'll work on people who just want a free service.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Has Fox forgotten that vegging out or having background noise while doing other stuff is most of the point of watching TV. Nothing will tick someone off more than have to fumble around and click to proceed every few minutes.
We all know they gave up on music years ago, I thought all they ran now was commercials for crap I don't want to buy. I can't tell the difference between their awful reality show and infomercials.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
TV shows are now 23 minutes long.
For syndicated shows/reruns on cable nets, they will put back the bits cut out to squeeze in more commercials. New shows will either shoot more material and/or add time back to the opening/closing credits. Opening credits have shrunk over the years from over a minute for a 30 minute sitcom to around 25-30 seconds these days for most shows. End credits have practically disappeared as squeeze credits have turned them into basically network commercial time to promo the next show in the series or the next one to come on that night.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
To me (and many other folks), the biggest single problem with commercials is that they are too loud. I zip past commercials if I'm running a time-shifted version on the DVR, but if not, I mute most of them and always mute the loud ones. In fact, there's no better way to make me ignore a commercial than for it to be too loud. So, a simple step to making commercials more tolerable would be to reduce their volume. (Oh, and while we're at it, can we ban those creepy Allstate commercials that have the deep disembodied spokesman's voice apparently emanating from normal people?)
I assume there are technological solutions to the volume problem, but none seem to come built-in to TVs and they don't seem to be readily available as some sort of add-on box. Perhaps there's some free software somewhere to do this just like there's free DVR software, but some of us don't want to go that far.
Decades ago, some Magnavox TVs featured something called "Smart Sound" for this, but evidently that either didn't really work or somehow otherwise never caught on. Until it does, the broadcasters and advertisers might start solving this problem for everyone on their end.
I saw an interactive ad before and it was effective. I haven't been to any of the TV network sites to watch programming since. I was already annoyed by many of the networks that refused to let the viewer pause commercials, which meant that I couldn't pause the programming at "natural" breaks. Then they had the audacity to expect me to get off my ass when I was perfectly willing to sit through the commercials. Good grief. If they insist upon being that controlling, then it's better to go elsewhere for entertainment.
...how capitalism never works and the only way to get corporations to change is through government regulation?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Of course now when you got the the movie theater, you get to see commercials too, and it's not just those movie commercials normally called trailers. We see car, jewelry, and bank commercials, too.
Oh joy, really draws me to the theater.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Fox says the shorter ads, which require viewers to engage with them online, are more effective because they guarantee the audience's full attention."
It always amazes me how marketeers actually think people like to view and "participate" in advertisements.
.
In this case, "full attention" means that the ad "watcher" is randomly pressing parts of the screen to make the ad progress and go away. "Full attention" may well mean that the viewer is saying to herself, "I'll never buy anything from this company because their ads re so friggin' annoying..."
"Time Warner's truTV will cut its ad load in half for prime-time original shows starting late next year"
Wait, so you're gonna react to a problem a year from now?!
I know this is probably driven in part by existing contracts, and while the current state of advertising is definitely a mess, I think it's more a symptom of an underlying problem. And that problem is that in almost every respect, traditional TV broadcasters have been way too slow to keep up. Almost without exception they had to be dragged into the 21st century. They had to be coaxed into alternate viewing devices, allowing time-shifting was a huge battle, etc.
The way they alienate their users via current ad models is bad, but it's just an example from a larger set of ways they alienate their users.
Fox says the shorter ads, which require viewers to engage with them online, are more effective because they guarantee the audience's full attention."
Just like they read every EULA? Or how they read the notifications in Windows? They'll quickly learn the pattern they need to click to get back to watching their show. I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen people install malware because they reflexively clicked some pop up window from their web browser. I've caught myself almost doing it because I was in a hurry. This will be no different.
I hope it comes to SyFi. I don't watch it any more because the ads overwhelm the TV content.
Ads are not the only problem with TV. The programming has become pretty ridiculous. Reality TV, especially, is extremely stupid. The only reality TV I used to watch were cooking shows, but I think by now everyone understands that they are not "real", that even the time clocks and whatnot are all BS. A friend, who used to like to watch ghost-hunter shows and Finding Bigfoot, complained last weekend, "They never find any ghosts. They never find Bigfoot. God! I've been wasting my time!" So, bad programming combined with too many commercials is just unbearable. I recently got rid of digital cable and went to bare-bones service. I don't miss it at all, and I'm saving $75 a month.
Proverbs 21:19
Maybe they will return to actually showing the ending credits at a speed that is readable.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
TV shows are now 23 minutes long.
There can be only one answer to what they're going to do with the extra time: run miniature infomercials.
"So, what is a 'miniature infomercial'?"
"It's like a regular infomercial, just shorter. Say, 30 seconds."
Dark Reflection
I am not really a ad hater. What I don't like it ads that repeat themselves over and over and over again. Its the same watching news snippets online. You have the endure the same darn ad for every video. Has anyone else noticed that the companies with the most ads are drug ads? Is it any wonder prescription drugs cost so much? My solution is not to cut down on the number of ads, because what we will see is not longer programming times, but rather longer commercial ads.
No the solution is shorter ads in blocks and reduce costs per ad so that maybe we get at least some different ads so we don't get bored seeing the same ones.
Also someone mentioned the loudness of the ads, yes the modulation is maxed out many times and I thought Congress passed legislation limiting modulation in ads? Personally I don't know why ad companies don't do better at making ads palatable because the end result of people hating ads or skipping over ads means the ads are not effective. This to me is a waste of revenue by the company buying the ad. To me it would be an advantage to make ads at least acceptable to watch so it has more affect on the viewer in a positive way. Is that not marketing 101?
...but I remember when the whole purpose of paying for cable television was that in the beginning cable television didn't have commercials. Fuck the greedy cable companies! They are getting paid twice over. Once by viewers, and then again by advertisers.
The also cut the intros and credits, which account for a couple minutes in old shows.
For those "reality shows", that's easy: they can simply expand those "up next: Chumley eats a Curta calculator on a dare" and "earlier we saw Adam attempt to light a shark on fire using parabolic mirrors" segments around commercial breaks. Seriously, not counting those segments, is there even 23 minutes of actual content left?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Who cares about the credits? I don't care the names of the people who made a show any more than I care the names of the people who made my spatula.
They'll just overwrite the bottom of the screen with an ad played DURING the show. Networks are already doing this to advertise their other shows, and they'll just expand it to products now. Welcome to the CNN version of TV viewing, where the "crawls" shove the content you want to see into a teeny window in the upper right corner...
I hate ads period.
Making me interact makes me hate you more. I will never go on Hulu now that I know what's going down.
Oh and another way to keep your viewers is to crack down on ad volume to make sure it's not higher than the featured show. How can they think it's a good idea to blast my ears?
Please share with us an example or two of what you're doing that's having a practical effect on making the world better for everyone else.
It's not that I don't believe that you do, it's just that you're posting this criticism on an ad-supported site after digging into a topic that clearly doesn't apply to you.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is the cable companies, not the TV networks. I don't have a problem with TV commercials. I'm a cable cutter, and you aren't going to get me to sign back up because there are fewer ads. We need more local/regional competition in cable and internet providers to bring some decent service back.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
Problem with that is the shows themselves are built to x amount of minutes. Seems to me they really can't cut them unless the shows themselves are produced a bit longer. Last I heard, the average sitcom was actually 22 minutes in length.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
"So, what is a 'miniature infomercial'?"
Watch a really, really old show, like Burns and Allen. There's a segment in every episode where one character will awkwardly barges into a scene and start talking about the sponsor's product. The other actors react in character (as well as they can; it's rather forced) for a minute or so, then the interrupter will wander off and the main plot resumes. That's a mini-infomercial.
Modern shows do it more subtly with the characters shown driving the sponsor's vehicles with the camera centered on the brand badge or consuming a sponsor's beverage with the label carefully turned towards the camera. But soon they'll start actually mentioning the products in modern shows: "Wow what a great new car this is!" (followed by exchange on the virtues of said car) or "I just love drinking *soda/beer brand x*!" (followed by discussion of how the other character loves it too).
I think the question is less "how can they stop compressing older stuff" and more "how are they going to reduce commercial time when there's no extra bits of actual show to use to fill time?" All I can think is that they'll reduce the ad slot in the middle of the episode and bulk up the one after the credits, when nobody pays attention anyway.
Spotted them doing this in White Collar : for a few episodes they couldn't stop* talking about the features of the new Taurus, principally the navigation and collision avoidance.
* had a short clumsy scene where they talked about it briefly and then got down to business.
It's amusing to watch these long-time purveyors of crap scrambling to hang onto people who have other options. For decades, if any interesting show somehow made it to the tube, it was axed shortly thereafter, later to be labeled a "cult classic". Meanwhile, their lowest-common-denominator programming went on and on. They expanded from three channels of crap, to two-hundred channels of crap, and soon brought their commercials along with it. As for me, I grabbed a book in the early seventies, and never looked back until The Sopranos came along. Somehow, HBO discovered that people wanted good programming. Imagine that! Thus began the second Golden Age of Television.
The only problem, at least from my point of view, was that you had to pay for all that other crap, and pay big, just to get the one or two shows you were willing to watch. Not only that, but they shoved commercials down your throat, even though you were paying money! Enter the internet...
Now, both the music and the film industries begin yelping about how people are "stealing" from them, as they got a taste of their own medicine. After all, it's a bit ironic when you consider how long they've been ripping off artists, that suddenly they're concerned that we are ripping off artists. Yet, they could've tried to figure out a new business model, one that would give people what they so obviously wanted, at a reasonable price. Instead, they had to be dragged, kicking and screaming the whole way, into the brave new world. And they're still not there. They're still hobbling Netflix, and the promise of the "long tail".
Those making a quality product, and willing to adapt, will survive. As for the rest, with their commercials and sitcoms, the sooner they disappear, the better.
--
sudon't
- for some reason, even though I've logged in, this page won't refresh
DraftKings (or the other one) did this in The League this (final) season.
Product placement has always existed, but since we all skip commercials now, you gotta get your ad dollars somewhere.
A sad thought.
Knowing who made a show directly influences what other shows of theirs I may watch.
Knowing the manufacturer of my spatula may facilitate another purchase (or avoidance of purchasing from the same maker).
Please share with us an example or two of what you're doing that's having a practical effect on making the world better for everyone else.
It's not that I don't believe that you do, it's just that you're posting this criticism on an ad-supported site after digging into a topic that clearly doesn't apply to you.
(most slashdot users) "What, the internet has ads?"
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Now if network TV would kill those annoying animated people that pop up and cross their arms to let you know a new episode of their show is this Thursday at 8!
Have you ever had that crap block out something with subtitles? Majorly annoying!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Heh. I've always chuckled at that. Although I do need to take back something rather harsh I said a couple of years ago: I called the people you describe leeches and warned them that they are risking the existences of the sites they frequent, instead their actions are causing the related industries to sit up, take notice, and settle down.
I am quite happily eating my words.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Howard Shimmel, chief research officer at Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting, said in an interview. "Consumers are being trained there are places they can go to avoid ads."
Ahem, it's not training. It's called preference
More product placement in the shows themselves....
Too little too late. You guys jammed them in so much and so hard, plus using heavy compression so they are louder. I'm done. I record with a DVR that auto REMOVES commercials.
Suck it, I wont be watching your commercials anymore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
TV shows are now 23 minutes long.
This will go by the wayside eventually as Internet does not care or require 30 (or 60) minute episodes. This will only happen for Internet shows for now if the producers feel there may be some 30 minute TV presentation later. Syndication in some far away land, if nothing else.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't know how no one has brought up the Nissan Versa in Heroes yet.
In no real situation do people converse and fixate on a brand obsessively - with the exception of Apple.
The new Pepsi commercial I'm hearing on the radio is jarring: Every sentence contains the word Pepsi somewhere, even though the conversation style is supposed to be natural. It's as if we're being conditioned to actually talk like that. I don't want to live in that world.
Based on the trend in recent years of most commercials being ads for other shows, I'm guessing this is just a reflection of the fact that they literally can't sell as many ad slots as they used to. They might as well pretend they're doing this for some reason other than desperation.
"I meant to do that. Yeah, that's the ticket."
They should have thought of the potential backlash when they were innundating folks with commercials in the first place.
I quit watching television because of my hatred for advertising. It was reaching the point on some networks where, towards the end of a show, it seemed there was more air time for ads than the show itself. It was infuriating and I simply gave up.
Turned in all my hardware and dropped cable TV completely from my life. I haven't missed it.
I don't see myself returning to pay television simply because they plan to cut down the ad time. Everyone knows that is a short term promise anyway.
Considering I can subscribe to Netflix and Amazon for the same monthly price it cost me to lease just the HD-DVR, I think I'll pass on returning to Cable.
Dear Cable / Satellite: The only chance you have to stop the bleeding is to seriously cut your prices and keep them low. ( This in addition to culling at least half of your advertising during programming or move all ads to the beginning or end of the show )
None of this introductory bullsh*t for twelve months. No more " ask your doctor if x is right for you " every 10 GD minutes.
You've enjoyed a duopoly for so long you don't even know HOW to respond when your customers leave you in droves. You have a very small window of time to get your sh*t in order before you cross the event horizon.
Beyond that point, there is no fixing it. You're done.
Exactly. If I want to think, I'll be here in front of my computer. If I want to veg out, I'll be in front of the TV.
He/she says smugly. Are you also going to criticize protesters who are against tax increases because they protest on the paved street which was paid for by tax money? Or people who want better food labeling who eat food that isn't labelled well?
Why don't you get a story published about what people are doing to make the world a better place and we can talk about that topic then.
Because it's ancient history.... Seinfeld OPENLY advertised products, and even made it part of the jokes. Snapple?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I have a show from the 90s on the HDD that's 23 minutes long too, 23:22.
Fair enough, but be honest - don't just usually just go look it up on IMDB?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Product placement has been going on for years. Who remembers I, Robot?
In 2005, there was an invited speaker at university who had a startup which could change the placed product. He played a scene from a soap, then played it again with all the actors t-shirts showing a brand, the logo on the fridge, groceries, etc -- all changed with a little video processing.
This way the production company can use a different sponsor for the DVD release, or the rerun in 10 years time, or whatever, without having to re-shoot the scene.
It's actually just 22 minutes, AFAIR; and yes, along with "coming" padding, those reality shows often repeat what happened at the end of the last segment at the beginning of the next segment - look for those to get longer.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Also, what the BBC does is interesting: they're not allowed to promote any particular brand, so where there's no option but to use an item with a logo (like a battery in an educational program) the logos are covered up with plain stickers.
In the news today.
Entertainment providers all over the world feel the pinch as the distribution channels become choked with content. Music publishers, book publishers, and movie and television producers all report a loss of income as the much lauded Internet continues to produce "free" content of equal or superior quality to what consumers once paid for.
Said one producer "If this keeps up, we'll need to cut costs. This might even affect our yearly stock dividends."
Painters and poets worldwide remain unaffected by the continuing glut except to remark that the public "wouldn't know art if it smothered them."
Gosh, I was just being silly with that term "mini-infomercial": I didn't realize it was part of the lexicon (or soon will be... ;-)
Speaking of really old shows, Groucho Marx once got in a lot of hot water for owning a car that wasn't from the type he hawked for his sponsor on every show: Desoto-Plymouth.
WAY too much advertisement and "news" are as action packed as an action movie. Truth, facts, investigating stories or backing up your claims ... who cares?!
show em death and feed em fears.
I have money to spend but I'd rather burn it before I give TV networks another cent.
TV is dead to me and I have no intention to return, ever!
Pay TV with any ads at all is fucking insane. Whey the hell would I pay to watch ads?
I've got free broadcast TV for background noise. I've got Hulu/Netflix for anything that I actually want to watch (yes, yes, Hulu is worthless), and I've got torrents for anything that networks won't let me access from my Amazon Fire TV. Hulu is the only place I see ads, and they're really not terrible. I got fed up when the ads got so much louder than the content due to compression.
TV is a "sometimes treat". It's not something that is necessary for most people (excluding people who can't move but still need entertainment). It's nice to have, but the way that it's been mismanaged means that fewer people are going to watch it. Such is life.
He/she says smugly.
Hah. Bet the irony of that statement is lost on you.
Are you also going to criticize protesters who are against tax increases because they protest on the paved street which was paid for by tax money? Or people who want better food labeling who eat food that isn't labelled well?
Are you going to keep dodging my question? If so, could you at least get down to an apples-to-apples comparison? For example: Why, yes, I would criticize a Vegan who followed me into a pizza joint, approached me unsolicited, and rudely voiced his opinion of my lunch after taking a bite of a salad he had just put bacon-bits on.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
There was something on the BBC news this morning. They're incorporating the ads into the shows.
A character in an Australian soap skates past a poster, and the poster will be for a local product depending on where it's being broadcast.
They were even [the moving version of] shopping different cars into scenes. And the pixels weren't wrong - it wasn't at all obvious, even if you've seen a few.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The length of some single ads are insane. I live in rural southern Ontario and get decent DTV coverage. Mostly american TV, and it is insane how long some ads play. I can't remember what it was for (shows you how good the ad is) but I think it was for some sort of medication and the commercial was about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes long. It just went on and on and the worst part about american ads and TV in general is how insincere they feel. So after their overly long rant about why you should bleed out your ass because you have the sniffles, the ad plays again!
I don't care if that company paid for 2 ad spots or not but whoever decided to play the same commercial back to back is a moron. It seems to be happening more and more. I don't know if this is a sign that less companies are advertising on TV, or if it's just ads competing for good spots and taking the whole break for themselves in an attempt to stop rivals advertising close to theirs.
At least online I have the option to block ads and some control over the content, but TV really seems to be digging itself a hole. I understand why so many Americans are stressed or generally unhappy because your commercials are absolutely pathetic and really drive home the fact that your sick and going to die if you don't take "Brand X Antidepressants: Now with 20% less brain leakage! chanceofbrainbleakagemaynotactuallydecrease. BRAND X".
Jesus Slashdot, really? "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there." What's the point of that...
The initial prospect of cable tv back in the 80s was to watch ad free and uncensored content at a price.
Until they go back to that model, I will continue to get all of my content through torrents. I mean they've already robbed me of at least 20 grand over the years so they can fuck themselves if they don't like it.
I had cable TV for free for many years because my cable modem provider forgot to block cable TV when I signed up for just internet. Even though I was getting hundreds of channels for free, I just couldn't get myself to watch it. I'm not sure why anyone would pay for to watch that drivel.
I pay for Netflix now because I like the TV shows they have... but I still download the pirated versions of the TV shows even if Netflix has them just because I like the ability to click a file and have it instantly start playing without buffering or having to get it from a server, without having to worry about Network congestion.
It's an option. Hulu says something depressing like [32767 seconds until programming resumes - or click here to skip with a 30 second interactive ad]
Veggites can veg, anyone who finds ads annoying can click randomly on the dumb trivia game.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Where does most of the revenue for the TV networks come from? You guessed it, commercials. In my opinion, if the quality of a commercial is high then I see no problem in brainwashing.
Someone tried to tell me that programs are the same length they used to be with the same amount for station breaks and words from sponsors. I didn't take them at their word but looked online for episodes of old shows and news shows and compaired the lengths.
Do it yourself. Find online episodes of Gilligan's Island or other popular '60s and '70s shows and check the run length of modern shows.
Season 1 episode 3 on Youtube is 23min+
Survivor Season 30 episode 8 is 37 min and 2 seconds.
Oldies 46 min of program per hour. Now 37 min per hour. Almost 10 minutes per hour more than what I grew up with. Save a lot of time just watching the episodes online on Youtube a couple years later with the commercials cut.
Don't let anyone pass the lie that there are not more commercials. It is a fact that in an hour there is LESS program.
The truth shall set you free!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDm1xD_Kwyc
"Interactive ads" aren't new to Hulu, though, and don't completely halt playback.
The way it works is that you're first presented with a screen giving you the option to use the interactive ad or to watch the show normally with commercials. If there's no interaction after so many seconds (15?) then the show would automatically continue with normal commercials. They've also done similar campaigns where you are shown a very long commercial (either a movie/game trailer or one some medication commercial) in lieu of commercial breaks; these would default to the long commercial if there's no selection made (IIRC).
I hadn't seen these for a while before I signed up for their Commercial Free* plan. No surprise that Fox is using them again. Last campaign I can recall was for some car brand where you'd answer four multiple-choice questions. It was easy to just sit there and click-spam where an answer would appear, because it didn't matter if you were right or wrong, so you'd fly through the interactive ad in 5 seconds and avoid 300 seconds of commercials.
* Except for a handful of shows that require an advertisement to be shown at the beginning and end of an episode for some damn licensing reason, though
they are actually time-compressing programming to cram in more commercials.
What if you paid for a service and that service was provided to you with the provider focusing on you as the consumer instead of looking for ways to increase revenue from third parties off your transaction? You know, you pay for something so it's offered to you without having to bypass multiple additional barriers. This "cutting back" is too little too late now that they waited for competition to evolve the ecosystem instead of driving the change themselves.
last I heard, shows were shot to 52 minute lengths, and had initially designated certain unnecessary scenes that could be cut to drop the runtime to 48 minutes. Additional allowance was added to cut to 46, and finally to 42 minutes. But cutting 10 minutes out of an hour long show was starting to have serious effect on the shows. It was getting common to have scenes that weren't properly set up and left viewers confused about what was happening becuse needed shots were being replaced with more ads.
And who remembers back in what was it... 1987 or so, when the rules on commercials got removed "because they weren't necessary" claimed the advertisers. And within months commercials per hour roughly doubled and pissed off pretty much everyone. I remember a period of a few months where TV was essentially unwatchable, with a 2 minute break every 4 minutes or so. Some of that got put back but I didn't keep track of it much back then. Just goes to show, they'll be greedy clods every last minute they think they can get away with it.
It DOES surprise me here though that they appear to be somewhat proactive, if not at least fast-reactive, with regard to the public (who has been sick-n-tired of tv commercial onslaught for years now) who's finally got alternatives and is abandoning "free" broadcast tv in leu of "paying for less pain". Normally you'd expect the greedy fatcats to lawn-dart their industry before realizing at the end "maybe we went too far?" But they seem to be coming to their senses and acquiring a grip on reality much faster than usual now?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Yes, but you wouldn't need to if you had been able to read the credits.
We record all our shows so we can FF the BS. It's amazing how little content there is once you FF past the "coming up next" and "here's what happened last time" segments. I reckon an hour show is down to about 13 minutes of actual unique content now.
Even the news, it's actually funny to watch when a story breaks, and they have no actual information to report, so they bounce back and forth speculating about what might be happening just to fill minutes.
When I used to watch ad supported television, I would automatically mute the instant commercials came on and unmute when the show came back when I'd notice the network spot at the end of the ad slot which always signaled a return to the program. I got pretty good at this, I would be able to turn my attention to something else and some sort of sense for the timing of the screen dimming would let me know when the show was coming back and that's all it would take. This was all before TiVo existed. Once DVD TV seasons started coming out I'd just pick up entire old shows for $40/complete series and just watch that way, dropped live TV. That was in the early 2000s and haven't gone back at all. This because commercials are annoying, I haven't seen one in over 10 years and will do anything not to again.
Twinstiq, game news
What is this "TV" you speak of? Seriously, haven't watched almost anything on television for over a decade.
Not being snooty or anything, there's just nothing there to set aside time to watch that I can't digest in some other fashion.
Yes, it has adds when we come to certain websites (like this one) that are responsible enough that we greenlight the adblock and do not tick the "you are eligible to ignore advertising", because we want to encourage responsible internet behaviour when we see it - ie no 3rd party hosting, content relavant, unobtrusive ads.
You're missing the one other major effect of advertising and greed by the commercial networks:
Big Bang Theory - Season 1 episode 1: 22 minutes 58 seconds. The season averages about 21 minutes 30 seconds. The longest episode is 24:06.
Big Bang Theory - Season 9 episode 5: 18 minutes, 45 seconds. The last three episodes aired average about 18:50 seconds. The longest episode is 20:32.
So, over the past 8 years, the average episode has lost nearly 3 and a half minutes to additional commercials. A half hour show is now nearly 40% commercials. Compare that to 1966, when Star Trek episodes were 54 minutes long.
At this rate, by 2025, an hour long show will consist of less than 30 minutes of program and a majority of commercials. And then they wonder why people are pulling the plug...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
I am one of those people who was irked by the increased number, and duration, of commercials. I was never a big fan of television prior to that. I haven't really watched much television at all since that time. (I seem to recall it being a bit sooner but I'll take your word for it.) The internet is lovely for me. I watch documentaries almost exclusively (though I will go see a movie once in a while). Watching them, sans commercials, is excellent and there are some nice documentaries made today. I don't watch to learn and any learning is coincidental. They're entertainment for me. It's why I can recount a bunch of history and science but not know the names, all the places, or even the exact dates.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There are edited down versions of Mythbusters on torrent sites, with all the crap cut out. There isn't even 10 minutes of content per half hour. Including the adverts only about 25% of the show is worth paying attention to.
It's better now they have gone back to just the two guys, but for years it was 75% filler and repeating what you had seen 30 seconds earlier.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I live in Africa, where none of those shows are broadcast anyway. I buy shows one series at a time, rip them to a NAS, and watch them on Roku. I haven't seen a commercial in many years, and don't intend to. I also watch what I want when I want it. Downside: I'm a year or two behind, but that doesn't bother me. Upside: I can wait until the ratings in and let the rest of the world decide for me which shows are worth watching and which are crap (exception: the public sometimes gives high marks to stupid shows). Cost to me one a full season of one show: just less than one dollar.
I'll never watch over-the-air or cable television again. Never.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I would be perfectly ok with ads on the television if I didn't already pay 80 USD a month for Directv.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
That sounds eerily close to how my memory works. Books are useless to me, but I learn well from AV sources.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
But still tracked - doublclick, google adwords conversion, google analytics, google dynamic remarketing, janrain, scorecard research beacon, taboola. The tracking is more of a concern than the ads ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I've noticed that on rebroadcasts of older shows. One that was especially jarring was a scene outside a theater on "Friends," where the movie poster in the background was for a movie that wouldn't be released for 20 years. That broke my suspension of disbelief so bad, I literally had to watch something else.
Modern shows aren't written or shot to the old 52 minute length. They're designed for the 42 minutes that a typical network show gets these days. The running time of the disc or Netflix version is marginally longer because it has the full end credits, not the sped-up ones that are used on broadcasts now.
If I write it down then it sticks with me for a longer period. Maths have to be conceptualized for me to grasp them. If I can do something related then that helps, even if it's tangentially related. For instance, I plan on going to Antwerp - not because any great thing happened there but because that's where the Germans were going during the Battle of the Bulge. That will be enough, coupled with some research and documentaries, for me to cement it more firmly into my head. Just going to Gettysburg helped me to put it all together, sort of about the time that I went past the graves on my way up to Little Round Top. Little things make the whole thing piece together and then, sometimes, it sticks.
I don't really have a better way to describe it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
" ... stop taking Hurumbosol if you are dead"
That was the last episode I watched of that series. If I wanted to watch an infomercial, I'd watch one. Having the characters gush about that damn car for most of the episode basically killed any interest I had in watching that show.
Then again, I now have Netflix, so I don't watch 'commercials'. Went over to my mom's recently and tried to watch broadcast TV. I turned that shite off after the first almost 5 minute 'break'. Just can't / won't deal with it anymore.
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
... so long as they're not LOUD, invasive, annoying, stupid, repetitive, etc.
But we can expect to see more product placement - which is OK so long as it's not over-the-top. But with the set-top-boxes provided by cable/satellite providers - I can envision ads running superimposed over the content or off to the side in the margins to keep the cord-cutters and DVR fast-forwarder's at bay. They'll always figure out a way to make more money on top of the subscription fees.
There's also this recent example of an entirely non-awkwardly integrated product placement.
In Australia, your ISP is required by law to retain most of that as "metadata" anyway. Sigh.
sustainable living
What's a TV?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I don't mind the amount of commercials, what I do mind is the insane monthly fees for cable TV AND the large amount of ads. A decent TV/Internet/Phone package is now more expensive than a car payment (yes, I drive cheap cars!).