Cable Speeds Up TV Shows To Show More Ads

I don't really understand how they don't lose customers by the millions.. it really bewilders me, and makes me believe I make that much less money than what the statistics tell me or something.
For one yeah, I could pay for it, but I would not call it 'afford' it.
Second when I ask, you saw this or that show ( I saw it OTA) must people have answered, well, I don't watch that much TV (which is bullshit the average is 8 hours a day I think).
So cable has millions upon millions of subscribers that pay a significant amount of money they probably don't 'really' have, and they 'don't watch that much TV'. Then you are paying for piles and piles of commercials.
Nothing but incredible.
I will happily admit, my TV is on 24/7 (almost), with either Netflix, or OTA. so I do watch tons of TV.. I still have not decided if to get another streaming service, I don't know what would compliment netflix best.
 
Other than sports, most of the stuff I want to watch is available online. I cut cable years ago and see no reason I'll ever go back.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
Because Netflix doesn't have ALL the content just yet, especially live content like sports and news. Granted, you can get some of that content online through other means, but it isn't a one stop shop like cable TV is and idiot average joes are still willing to pay for that convenience.

The cost savings are enticing for some people to wisen up, so there is a slow progression towards online services.
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What makes me sad about this is, in maybe ten years or so, we will be having the same kinds of conversations about Netflix. Right now they are something of the golden child of video consumption. Eventually, however, when they have displaced the giants as our primary means of obtaining movies and TV, the ad companies will come knocking with pocketfuls of cash to convince Netflix to start advertising. It will be innocuous at first, ads on the search page or the like. Then it will be "previews". Eventually, we'll be watching the Lord of the Rings Trilogy 683 minutes of total run time distilled down to 3 hours, with the remaining 503 minutes spent peddling the latest "As Seen on Netflix" garbage requiring you to allow 6-8 weeks for delivery.

By the way, get off my lawn you damn hooligans!
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
LOL.

In a way they kind of do already. You ever see a commercial for medicine?

Ever since they were required by law to read side effects, those commercials look more like this:

Ever had upset stomach, rash, eye twitch, or just a random urge to put bludgeon your neighbor to death with your fully erect penis?

Then FUCKITOL IS FOR YOU!!!!!!

[pictures of random man and woman doing daily activities and being intimate play for next 30 seconds]

At the end is a warning that is written in fine print and spoken by a man with a deep voice you can barely hear. He speaks faster than a tweaker who just got done doing a mixture of methamphetamine, bath salts, and an 8 ball of cocaine while washing it down with a triple espressso:

Warning: may cause bloody stool, psycotic thoughts, schizophrenia, dick rot, blue waffle, penile warts, abiltiy to think you can predict the future, desire to shove weirdly shaped objects in every orifice, coughing up blood, skin conditions that make you look like a reptile, brittle bones, useless superpowers, super acidic urine that melts porcelain, elephantiasis, and any random other ailment that this product is not listed as a cure for. Do not take if you are pregnant or wish to become pregnant as your offspring will likely tear through your uterus and eat the face off your doctor while farting show tunes out of its anus.
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Made me spit coffee all over my monitor. Hilarious and made my morning. Thank you.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
Because Netflix doesn't have ALL the content just yet, especially live content like sports and news. Granted, you can get some of that content online through other means, but it isn't a one stop shop like cable TV is and idiot average joes are still willing to pay for that convenience.

The cost savings are enticing for some people to wisen up, so there is a slow progression towards online services.
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·HBO + Netflix + Sling (ESPN ESPN2 etc.) + Amazon Prime = $60/month all with separate bills. Add internet (another bill) 30-40$ a month and I'm right back to paying exactly what I pay anyways with a cable provider. :rolleyes:
 
More time showing commercials has been increasing for decades. I think an hour long show in the late 1950's and early 60's was 52 minutes. Now I think it is down to about 42 minutes of actual show for an hour program. This trend will continue until something hits a wall and then I think the "typical" television show will no longer exist.
 
For years Radio has compressed or sped up syndicated shows to fit commercials in. I wouldn't expect TV to be any different.

Have you ever noticed SpikeTv cuts to a commercial, but leaves the show running? I've been watching versions of COPS, and parts of the segment are not shown because it was covered by a commercial.
 
For funsies and my own amusement, I did the following nonscientific study.. CBS.com has a variety of old CBS TV shows available which seem uncut, so based on the length of episodes I found there, I guessemated/approximated the "average" length of an "average" episode for a given TV season of the following shows..

For "hour long" episodes (sorted by length)..

Perry Mason 1957 53:00
Hawaii 5-O 1968 51:05
Star Trek 1966 50:40
Mission-Impossible 1972 50:40**
Mission-Impossible 1966 50:10**
Hawaii 5-O 1979 49:52
MacGyver 1985 48:25
MacGyver 1991 47:53
Beverly Hills 90210 1990 46:50
Twin Peaks 1990 46:40
Melrose Place 1992 46:00
Melrose Place 1998 44:40
CSI - Miami 2011 43:30


"half hour long" episodes (sorted by length)..

I Love Lucy 1956 26:00*
Brady Bunch 1969 25:35**
Brady Bunch 1972 25:30**
I Love Lucy 1951 25:00*
Cheers 1982 24:56
Taxi 1978 24:40**
Taxi 1981 24:30**
Family Ties 1989 24:10**
Family Ties 1982 24:00**
Cheers 1992 23:20
Frazier 1994 22:45
Frazier 2003 22:10
Two and a Half Men 2014 21:20***
The Big Bang Theory 2014 20:38***


Notes..

* - The very first few "I Love Lucy" episodes were only in the 23 minute range but, later in the 1951-52 season, episodes became about 26 minutes in length and stayed that way.. hence why my average first season of "Lucy" is shorter than it's last season.. but for all practical purposes, "I Love Lucy" was a 26 minute show.

** - These shows can be assumed to have the same length from it's first season to it's last.. any variation of length is probably due to my BS guessing method.

*** - Based on the seven episodes of the 2014-15 season currently on CBS.com


General Note..

- Almost all the shows listed had a great deal of variance in length, even in the same season. "Star Trek" 1966-67 episodes ranging from 53:39 to 49:44. Even today, this still occurs as the 2014-15 episodes currently posted on CBS.com of "The Big Bang Theory" ranges from 21:33 to 19:50.. a 1.5 minutes variation!!


Conclusions..

Although based on a VERY small sample size, the trends are obvious (and to no ones surprise)..

- "Hour long" shows have lost roughly 9.5 minutes of show time since the 1950s, broken down approximately as follows..

1950s-60s - lost 2 minutes
1960s-70s - lost 1 minute
1970s-80s - lost 1.5 minutes
1980s-90s - lost 2 minutes
1990s-Today - lost 3 minutes


-"Hawaii 5-O" lost a minute from 1968 to 1979
-"Mission-Impossible" didn't lose any time between 1966 & 1972 (despite what I wrote, I doubt it GAINED any time!!)
-"MacGyver" lost 30 seconds between 1985 & 1991
-"Melrose Place" lost close to 1.5 minutes between 1992 & 1998


- "Half hour long" shows seem to have lost roughly 5 minutes since the 1950s, broken down approximately as follows..

1950s-60s - lost 30 seconds
1960s-70s - lost 1 minute
1970s-80s - lost 30 seconds
1980s-90s - lost 2 minutes
1990s-Today - lost 1 minute

- "I Love Lucy", "The Brady Bunch", "Taxi" and "Family Ties" didn't lose any time from their first season to last
- "Cheers" lost 1.5 minutes between 1982 and 1992
- "Frazier" lost 30 seconds between 1994 and 2003

I can understand somewhat why older thus longer shows are being time condensed today, but let's just hope we aren't all talking in 2030 about how "The Big Bang Theory" has been sped up in the US for 3 more minutes of commercials!!

Now just don't get me started on the drop of episodes made per season!!
 
MavericK96 said:
I watched the SNL 40th Anniversary Special recently. They kept talking about it being a "3 and a half hour special"...

Actual runtime: 2 hours, 33 minutes.

The rest was commercials.

Fuck that shit.
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I record the shows on my Win 7 DVR, and then download the show so i dont have to edit out the commercials myself. I do the recording mostly as a backup because the websites arent always there....
 
Rahh said:
·HBO + Netflix + Sling (ESPN ESPN2 etc.) + Amazon Prime = $60/month all with separate bills. Add internet (another bill) 30-40$ a month and I'm right back to paying exactly what I pay anyways with a cable provider. :rolleyes:
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Quite a few advantages there by the looks of it.
You get better services, more choice and free internet.
 
Ah yes the endless barrage of bullshit advertising. I can't remember the last time I ever bought anything because of an ad. Does advertising even work? Maybe with some people in some demographics. But it doesn't work well on me anyway. And I suspect it's the same for most of us here.

It's really gotten out of hand in the movie theaters too. When I was a late 80s/early 90s kid the theater only had about a 10-15 minute delay before the start of the movie. Now we have a bazillion god damn commercials to go through AND advertising on the screen while we wait for the lights to dim. W T F.
 
I don't have cable for TV, just Internet, they can do whatever they want. if it's too bad, stop paying. That will fix them.
 
We have Google net and cable. But we absolutely do not watch live TV because of the commercials. It's horrible. We only watch stuff we record off the DVR. If we do see something on live tv, we record it and move to something else.
 
Talk radio has been doing this for years. There's a program called "cashbox" or something like that that will compress live audio by chopping out bits of dead air. It gives a local station enough time to insert one or two commercials before the start of a live segment, then by the time the segment ends, it's caught back up and they can start again.

I remember hearing that Rush Limbaugh was railing against it because it was "stealing" from the EIB network.
 
xorbe said:
Old, old news!
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Yep. I ran into the video by accident a day or two after it was on Reddit. Whoever posted it there took it from a 2013 AVS Forum post.

This has been around and used in various forms since the 90s. Cut frames and you'll gain 30 seconds to a minute. Trim scenes and you can gain another minute. Trim the openings and you can gain another minute. Just relying on speeding up is actually pretty crude nowadays, and generally isn't done past 3% as a lot of people start to notice after that point.
 
More commercials? Have you ever tried to watch a syndicated show like Seinfeld at night? It's ALL commercials. I think they actually cut out parts of the show to squeeze more ads in.
 
This is why PVRs are great.
I record a lot and watch it later with no ads :)
But we're spoilt a bit in the UK cos the BBC has no adverts and they quality is pretty high.
And F'ing Heck do I hate most of the adverts on the other channels.

The adverts, channel squishing and speeding up cant be helping the fight to prevent other downloads of episodes.
Serves them right when people are forced to find other sources - when the quality is crap, missing content, speed is screwed, awesome length of adverts and adverts are utter shite.

I remember adverts that were for interesting things.
Now they tell me I have PPI, grrrrrrr.

(PPI = Payment Protection Insurance that was mis sold by banks [people were conned into buying it].
Banks have had to put billions aside to refund people and despite this going on for what must be years, the adverts on TV are never ending. "Have you got P P ee'eye".)
 
It irritates me that they are compromising the shows quality for the ads -- plus, I never watch the commercials anyway.

My wife and I basically never watch anything live, ever -- I have multiple Ceton and HDHomeRun Prime tuners feeding WMC boxes and record everything -- and I have DVR-MSToolBox and Comskip setup and tuned to automatically remove all the commercials. It works great, we never even have to touch the remote, it just analyzes them and skips the commercials automatically.

Before that, I had a custom modified VCR that monitored a combination VBI CC data and AMOL codes and did a very good job of pausing record whenever a commercial would come on -- although you sometimes lost about 1-2 seconds of the show when it resumed recording (not always, but fairly often).

Commercials, ick.
 
Hey everyone does backend profiting in some capacity. Att launched internet services with privacy loopholes to attract ad companies with your browsing habits. Ads are here to offer that extra couple bucks on you.
 
samm said:
Hey everyone does backend profiting in some capacity. Att launched internet services with privacy loopholes to attract ad companies with your browsing habits. Ads are here to offer that extra couple bucks on you.
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regardless of how unethical or sneaky this maybe.
 
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