The Born Loser by Art and Chip Sansom for May 26, 2023

It used to be that every 15 minutes a TV show would have a couple of minutes of commercials, now after every 15 minutes of commercials there is a couple of minutes of a TV show.

And that my liege is but one reason I do not watch broadcast TV anymore.

I’m sure the show is a repeat, maybe you’ll see a new commercial?

Is he watching the Super Bowl?

With Tivo and adblock, I’ve only seen a small trickle of ads for decades

Even honesty can be overdone sometimes.

Blow up the TV!!!

That is the right of it. And “previews” of the next episode have become so truncated as to be useless.

Ain’t that the truth.

Sounds about right. It’s one of the big reasons I hardly ever watch television. That and most of the program offerings are lousy.

In Spain it is crazy. They have really long advert breaks of up to 20 mins. If you start watching a film at 10pm, you end up finishing around 1 to 2 am. Anyone purchasing a slot in the middle of that 20 mins is wasting their money as there is no-one watching it. Gone off to do other things.

But first, three minutes of recapping what we showed before the break. Then two minutes of preview for the next segment. About ten minutes of actual content over all. Including three minutes of production credits. Two minutes of open graphics and dramatic music. (I used to work on these shows.)

That’s how television has evolved over the years. A 60 minute show in the mid-60’s ran for roughly 50 minutes. That shrank to roughly 42 minutes in the mid-90’s. Who knows how much it’s shrunk since.

yep, that sounds about right even on YouTube as well. :}

That’s how most TV shows are these days.

National news sets record for pharmaceutical commercials. Breaking news NOT!

In Canada there use to be rules about the amount of commercials. Those rules were dropped…because of pressure from advertisers. Typical. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is a joke. There re NO standards where you can watch a TV show with full frontal nudity at 10:00 PM.

Remember when pharmaceuticals and lawyers couldn’t advertise on TV? Yes, it was true a long time ago.

Nothing disturbs Brutus at home…………

That’s why we watch nothing live. When you record it, you can zip through the commercials. Sponsors are slow to respond to this. Only recently have I noticed ad banners below or beside the screen.

What Geophyzz said !!

I wish it wasn’t the truth but it is one of the big reasons that streaming services do so well and commercial tv, aside from news, is doing so poorly. Well, also the quality of commercial tv leaves a lot to be desired, ie Good Content for example…..

And I wonder what Newton Minow would think of TV now (he famously described network TV as a “vast wasteland” in 1961)?

His name was expanded slightly for “Gilligan’s Island” (those poor people) to name the boat that went aground – The Minnow.

Only old people watch regular TV these days and commercials breaks are “gifts” to them. Bathroom breaks every 5 minutes or so.

one of the main reasons I stopped watching broadcast tv years ago.

Finally truth in programming.

They’ve moved the bulk of the commercials closer to the end of the program with fewer and shorter breaks at the beginning.

Brutus ruminates, “To think, I pay for this stuff, at least they could give me a little more product.” Value for the money, as they say on amazon, maybe I’ll try “FreeVee”…

Either way… In broadcast and streaming

And if the show is on the network will run annoying pop-up promotions throughout the show :-(

That’s why I record EVERYTHING!!!!!

NBC Sunday Night Football. They run long strings of commercials that are occasionally interrupted by a football game.

If you can remember what your program was even about!