Television is a business. I get that. But I’m sick of commercials. I’m especially frustrated by commercials now that I have a DVR, and now that I watch so many of my favorite shows online with limited or no commercial interruption—after that, watching regular TV that you can’t fast forward through is immensely frustrating.
It’s pretty ridiculous how much of an average TV show is advertising. According to Wikipedia, commercials used to take up nine minutes of an hour-long program in the 1960s. Now they take up roughly eighteen minutes an hour. That’s almost a third of the show. Since modern TV shows are written to fit into the contours of commercial breaks, watching them isn’t usually too annoying; sure, it’s nicer to fast-forward through the commercials if you can, but I can stomach sitting through the commercials. What annoys the crap out of me is having to watch a sporting event or movie that gets interrupted every ten minutes for a commercial. Many movies feel completely disjointed when they’re edited and cut up for television. And besides, I have an extremely short attention span, so I usually change the channel, watch something else until a commercial comes on, then flip back to the movie to find I’ve missed some major plot point. Whoops. I love watching a movie on TCM or Fox Movie Channel or HBO or whatever, where I get to see the whole thing straight through. But AMC or some other commercial-laden network? Forget it.
And sports? Sure, some sports (baseball, for example) have plenty of natural stopping points for a brief commercial break. But I hate the way in which football and basketball games get stopped every few minutes by TV timeouts. If I could go back in time and change one thing about American sports, I’d make it like soccer where teams whore themselves out with advertising on jerseys and all over the stadia in exchange for getting to see a game without commercials.* I’d love it if we got rid of TV timeouts every four minutes in college basketball; just show a 30-second commercial each time a team calls a timeout. And who doesn’t hate the touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial pattern so common in NFL games? And to throw in an example from another sport, DirecTV offers a couple of channels of bonus coverage for all of the Grand Slam events in golf and tennis. And for the recent British Open** golf tournament, they had something I hadn’t seen before on one of the extra channels—an international feed, completely commercial free. (Also, on a somewhat unrelated note, it was also blissfully free of the stupid feature stories, lengthy interviews, and talking-heads segments that ESPN felt compelled to shove down our throats. I tried watching ESPN a few times and several times I went 20 minutes without seeing more than one or two actual golf shots.) And every time the Olympics rolls around, NBC has to scramble to fit advertising into team sport telecasts that lack commercial breaks. I enjoyed watching hockey in the Olympics; there was a wonderful flow to the games (thanks to the lack of TV timeouts) that’s completely missing from an NHL broadcast.
I realize that the business model of television requires lots of ads. But I think it’s fair to say that with the Internet and DVRs, the model is shifting. Probably we’ll be seeing a lot more product placement and on-screen advertising graphics, as TV executives realize how many ads are being skipped over. And hopefully this somehow leads to a world where I don’t have to see 20 minutes of ads an hour.
* Actually, if I could change one thing about sports, I’d probably require that all teams be fan-owned enterprises that are concerned with winning, not with turning a profit. But that’s not exactly feasible, I suppose.
** Yes, I am aware that the proper name is “The Open Championship.” Now shut up, Anglophiles.
Actually, what the model will shift to is an on-demand streaming-content model with commercials you can’t skip over. On the major networks’ web delivery of their content, it used to be that you’d only get one single 15- or 30-second ad at each commercial break. Now you’re seeing usually two 30-second ads. Pretty soon that will be three ads, and then four, and the best you will be able to do is switch to another browser tab to look at some Google News or failblog or whatever during the commercials.
I hate the idea of NBA or NFL players wearing ads on their uniforms. (The apparel logos are already bad enough.) Besides, most if not all of the commercial breaks are actual breaks in the action. If you weren’t watching a commercial, you’d be watching a bunch of players standing around listening to the offensive coach devise strategy for the next play, and that’s as bad as commercials.
And yes, TCM is teh best channel evar.
Most NBA and NFL breaks are hardly natural breaks in action. Most of the breaks are TV timeouts, with some being actual timeouts that are stretched well beyond what their duration was in the pre-TV era. As I said, I don’t mind a 30-second or 60-second break if a team calls a timeout. What I do mind is a college basketball game with media timeouts after every four minutes off the game clock.
As far as online TV goes, I think the jury’s still out. I think it’s reasonable to expect an increase from current levels of ads, but I question how effective online ads will be compared to TV ads. It’s very possible that well-targeted ads could do quite well, but it’s also possible that people will just ignore them, just as they fast forward through commercials with their DVRs. Because of that I expect the lines between content and advertising to become more blurred; that, in theory, forces audiences to watch the ads if they want to watch the program.