Cable networks are speeding up TV shows to cram in ads
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
One is the sheer number of ad breaks in programming. Here in Sweden there's only a few with a good chunk in between.
The second is ads during programs. I mean not even having the courtesy to pause but instead overimpose.
I sort of get it now why USA import shows have the weird breaks though.
Given, I seldom watch TV here anymore, so I might be mistaken.
I turned on the TV in the US hotel once for the experience. I found out that what I'd see as "making fun of the US ads" in the EU, was not even close to reality. It took me a moment to realise that the ad actually had monster trucks with the flag/eagle paint, guns, and explosions and it wasn't a cringe satire show.
It's craziness as people could be much more productive if they did one thing at a time. That said, people who have the television running all the time probably aren't seeking to optimize their productivity.
That's a direct result of networks dictating the # of commercial breaks in the show.
Watching a show like Battlestar Galactica is a bit odd because they liked to have dramatic little climaxes right before a commercial break.
As an American it's sort of funny because it's been so long since I watched broadcast/cable TV (10 years?) that I don't think this even existed at that time and I have to sort of imagine what this would look like.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hulu-netflix-driving-...
The scenes showing "natural" placement are often comically poor or heavy handed, with the logo always turned to camera.
Personally, and of course this is just my opinion, but I would absolutely take product placement shots (even of the variety given by my sibling comments) over 2m of commercials every 10 minutes in the show.
An ad spot interrupts the story and flow of whatever you're watching while you won't even notice a well placed product (Stranger Things Waffles, for example, are a rather good product placement)
Youtube interrupts with ads whereas I believe they used to front load the ads at the beginnng. I'd be way more inclined to respond favoribly to an ad for which I don't already have a negative association: breaking the flow of something I'm already watching.
I can't imagine anyone getting interrupted then buying the product who's advertising just abruptly interrupted something. I wonder how the analytics work on ads meaning what do they consider a success? Just that the ad played? Some action by the user?
Just like web browsing after ad blocking as compared to before, I've found that using youtube-dl (https://youtube-dl.org) just a few times has made me way less patient with this junk whenever I accidentally navigate to the official site.
> I can't imagine anyone getting interrupted then buying the product who's advertising just abruptly interrupted something. I wonder how the analytics work on ads meaning what do they consider a success? Just that the ad played? Some action by the user?
My impression has always been that there is almost no visible penalty for failure in advertising—you can't easily track the people who didn't buy your product because of an irritating ad—that even what must be the tiny success rate is deemed worth the investment.
(I think that also advertisers are in the same boat, relative to this, as consumers are: we want our products cheap, and manufacturers would rather keep them apparently cheap by loading hidden costs (like data gathering and advertising) on us than actually charge us what they're work; and advertisers, presumably, want their ads to work, so the networks would rather use whatever extreme and scummy trick is available if it appears to give them a short-term advantage over other networks than acknowledge the ineffectiveness of that technique.)
Quality advertisers will tell you if an ad sucks and is annoying potential customers (they measure accept/ignore/deny rates of ads).
The internet is a great tool to have a product offering race to absolute zero in both price, features and quality
How? If I don't respond to your ad, then how do you know whether it's because I just wasn't interested, or because I was interested and your ad removed that interest? That is, in this language:
> Quality advertisers will tell you if an ad sucks and is annoying potential customers (they measure accept/ignore/deny rates of ads).
how can you tell the difference between 'ignore' and 'deny'? (I think particularly of Pandora, which plays the same ad over and over and over and over. I don't mind it once, but, the more I hear it, the more I vow never to use the advertised company; yet I have no choice but to sit through it. How can any company measure the negative effect they're having on me in this way?)
Additionally advertisers do have surveys where users are asked about this (usually not many but sufficient to get a first guess).
On youtube the example would be the ratio of people clicking the ad, people letting the ad play out and people skipping it (and then likely also measuring how long it takes for them to click skip once it's available).
It's when it's obvious that it's a problem -- holding on the logo of a laptop, etc.
If a character has to eat, drive, or use some real object -- you might as well use a real one and get paid instead of having to create a fake one.
Another great example is Hello Kitty in "Ant-Man and The Wasp". IMHO, it's a real masterpiece - several seconds of pure focus on the product in slow-motion. And people love the scene, becuase it's surprising, funny and well woven into whole sequence.
Here's the relevant fragment of the trailer if you're interested: https://youtu.be/RPUH-FlVCPc?t=1m34s
Product placement is not intrusive at all.
Especially bad when they make a character say or do something that doesn’t fit with their persona to shoehorn mention of a brand.
Maybe it’s me getting older, but I can’t help but notice product placement, speeding up of shows, Netflix doing the opposite by stretching out shows with useless filler scenes, story arcs introducing unnecessary and tacked on side plots to increase # of seasons, extra sexual and gore content to shock.
It really ruins watching media for me. The last one I really liked was Breaking Bad I think.
Wow, that's really pushing the definition of product "placement". That needs another term like "in-show commercial".
I'm the same. The Netflix version of Black Mirror loses so much impact from the addition of 20 mins of dead filler.
Don't forget overly long and overblown fight and chase scenes that all movies must now have. They just bore me senseless. The first one I saw was fun, probably Blues Brothers, but even back then they were taking the mickey. Never the choreography and humour of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Nowadays at home when a movie starts a fight against the hero, or the car (spaceship) chase I tend to do something else for 5.
Breaking Bad was the best series to come out the US in ages. Even they lost the plot with the insanely long shootout with infinite ammo and insanely bad marksmanship. Thankfully that was a one off so very easy to forgive. :)
Brit series go too far the other way and cram far too much into too few episodes. I've been enjoying Last Kingdom but boy are they spoiling it by cramming two books into every season, with fewer episodes per series compared to the US average.
Now, we have three Roku TVs and two 4K AppleTV boxes (thanks to DirecTVNow). We subscribe to Netflix (free with T-mobile), DirecTVNow, and Hulu.
My dad came up and he loved our RokuTV so I bought him one. He likes it, but he would never go cable free.
With cable, you just turn it on and start watching. With the Roku TV, you have to sign up for an account, add channels, login to all of your subscriptions. If you have cable, you have to login to all of the different channels with your cable subscription. WiFi is also more flakey then cable. Then on top of that, they have to worry about going over thier 400Gb cap.
Can you imagine most 70+ year olds having to go through all of the hassle with five TVs? Heck, except for the RokuTV, all of thier TVs are CRTs, including one that I bought for myself when I moved out in the mid 90s.
But then again, it would be normal for everyone in the house over a certain age to have their own “screen” - a phone, a cheap tablet for young kids, etc. What’s the difference between the accessibility of screen that’s stationary and people being on their phone all of the time?
In my own house, we are a bit extreme with six - our room, son’s room, gym, game room, living room and guest bedroom.
Sitting down and reading bores me. I’d rather listen to an audiobook while I’m commuting or working out. Since I workout at home, I seldom just sit down and watch TV by myself. I catch up on TV while I’m working out.
I know plenty of people around who don't have a single TV in their 2br flats. A few have TVs that they use solely to play PS. That's why I suspect the culture is a big reason why American cable can be so user-hostile.
How many hours per day does the average kid spend watching YouTube (controlled by Google)? Of course FB is for old people but people spend hours a day on and off FB. For a lot of people FB is the internet. (https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...)
And my son has a Playstation. Guess what he spends a lot of time doing? Using it to watch YouTube videos of other people playing video games. Yeah that’s a thing.
Not to be snarky, but it's "replace TV with books"; to use substitute, it'd be "substitute books for TV."
(Yeah, I know language evolves, but Humpty Dumpty had his head, such as it was, in a warm dark place — '"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."' [0])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#In_Through_the_L...
1) If a new use of language is clear, that's what really matters. And if the new use makes it easier for writers / speakers to use the language with confidence — especially when it's not their first language — then so much the better.
2) To paraphrase a well-known saying: Language was made for man, not man for language.
Books are so boring. Like snooze.
Internet third world.
My parents live in a smaller town where their only choice is crappy cable. AT&T discontinued DSL but my mom kept her DSL service when they went for cable internet (long story but it made some sense for them).
It's flash, not sure it would run on a Roku.
But, that’s a separate box and remote he would have to deal with.
It can add up pretty quick if you subscribe to more than a few streaming services and with many groups going their own way we might likely end up back with group providers. What makes the cable free work for us is that it felt odd in this day an age to have internet and cable as both are effectively a transport method. Why cannot the cable provider stream over my internet connection at a discounted rate?
on a site note about speeding up shows, when watching most informational videos on youtube you can speed them up to 1.25 speed with no real loss in quality. some presenters are a bit long winded
There's probably a prediction in there about Amazon/Netflix/etc.
The EU tends to be more considerate of its citizens than "capitalism" would dictate. It's what gives it a bad reputation among republicans, especially those with very little understanding of the intricacies of a society. This being said the fact that stations are not forced to disclose this for every single show that is being showed other than "real time" is still a bummer.
I don't watch TV though but I feel compelled to have an opinion about it :).
Some channels get around that by broadcasting from other countries to Denmark though.
The one analog channel that abided by the rules would get around it for movies by inserting a "news update" in the middle and cramming ads around that.
The rules were relaxed in the digital switchover since it was clear that digital terrestrial would flop if it didn't get some of the satellite channels. Now it appears to be limited to 12 minutes/hour (and no ads targeted at children)
[2010/13/EU] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...
I'd say unobtrusive ads in search results, at the beginning of videos, etc., can be good. I'd feel grateful of Youtube switched back to front loading the ads to the point where I'd probably go out of my way to pay attention to those ads.
I don't know that "healthy" is the concern I'd have there. All television programming intentionally manipulates your emotions. That's why people watch it.
The same goes for... all other forms of entertainment, without exception.
Other countries have similar rules, complain to your regulator!
Even if ads and programming are the same db level, ads can easily be EQ'd to be perceived as louder
If I recall correctly from my time having Comcast, they don’t show commercials when you watch on demand after three days. I think it has something to do with ratings only count live + 3 days.
https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1626/why-do-wtbs-s...
Overlays and EAS have usually been acceptable, and composing the end titles with something else is a longstanding practice, but it doesn't actually modify the content directly.
No more annoying ads and restrictions.
So if uploading is not legal then you can't use torrent.
Why wouldn’t TV follow suit?
Working link to the Seinfeld example on YouTube:
(Sometimes things are actually shot at 23.976, so that they can be sequenced straight into 29.97 without needing the pulldown, but I'm not sure how common this is).
The other thing is that when converting to PAL, you have two choices - either apply a very complicated frame squence that I've long since forgotten all the details of, or just speed up the footage from 24fps (or 23.976) to 25fps, causing a raise in pitch.
So it's quite possible that neither of the versions you watched were actually at true speed or pitch - the NTSC version could have been slow and the PAL version could have been fast.
30fps (b&w NTSC) and 25fps (PAL) are derived from grid AC frequencies of 60Hz (NA) and 50Hz (most other countries). Kept the old-school electronics simple...
Jokes that were cutting edge 20-30 years ago need less introduction now. The easiest way to cut that unnecessary intro is just to speed up the show.
Another common practice years ago was simply to cut parts of a movie. They'd go to commercials and come back skipping a few scenes.