Commercials

I assume I know what television executives are thinking. We get so much for a commercial. So the more

commercials we show, the more money we'll make. I bet most people are smarter than them. I think its pretty clear that there is a point of diminishing returns. People will just stop watching TV when it gets to be too much. I don't remember when I heard this, but somewhere I learned that there used to be about four minutes of commercials for a half-hour show. I saw that we're now up to eight minutes for a half-hour show. I think its worse than that, though. I saw a Big Bang Theory episode on DVD. There you can see the full time of the show. It was 19 minutes and some seconds. So, 19 minutes of show and 11 minutes of commercials. There are a lot of times I'll channel surf and find something and watch it until a commercial comes up, then I leave or switch to a different show. 

I can't be the only one that does that. Or better yet, use a DVR. Most anything I watch, I make sure I can fast forward through the commercials. They companies paying for the ad time probably look at the ratings for the show and are content with that. Pretty misleading, I think. 

I don't have proof of this, but I think the streaming services are trying to sneak in more commercials now. To avoid that, you have to buy or rent the movie. So they make money from your subscription, but more, either from the advertisers or the extra you pay to rent it. There isn't a lot of that yet, but I think its coming.

Now that we're into March Madness, lets talk about commercials in basketball. The worst part of basketball is all the down times. In the NBA, each team gets seven time outs. Also, refs can stop the game for them to review a play. Plus there are what they call television timeouts to sell even more stuff.

I've been to enough NBA games to see people start leaving the arena in the fourth quarter. OK if your team is behind by 20 points, but it happens if its a close game, too. They want to beat the traffic and they know there are going to be a ton of timeouts. I've watched games on TV that are in the fourth quarter until someone calls a timeout. Close or not, I usually change the channel then. I might or might not go back at some point.

I saw an article that talked about a game that had 21.7 seconds left. It finished twenty minutes later. There were 8 fouls, 19 free throws, and I don't know how many but I'm guessing a ton of timeouts. Its all easily fixable, but fewer commercials would mean less money for the league and they probably wouldn't put up with that. What do less commercials matter if people aren't watching them?