Seems to me that commercials are taking up more time now then ever before. Last night I was watching the Amazing Race. 6 commercials before it started, then it starts with a recap of last week, break to 7 commercials including what new shows are currently on the network. Back to the show for about 9 minutes then another break with about 7 more commercials. I am getting so fed up with having to be forced to watch these same commercials over and over and over I may just start to DVR all my shows just so I can ff the commercials. This sucks because I like to watch most of them live.

Last week I watched a movie on LOGO which I know is only an hour and a half. The movie started at 3pm and was over at 5:30pm. 1 hour of commercials in between, this was just irritating to me.

Anyone else find there is more commercial time now then ever before on network TV?

Yes, there are way more commercials. That is why I DVR everything. Even with my favorite show, Big Brother, I normally do something else until it was ten or fifteen minutes in just to avoid the commercials.

I guess with more and more homes having DVR, companies are paying less for commercials, since they are much less valuable, so networks have to show more. It is going to be interesting to see all the different marketing done in conjunction with television programming to make up for the loss of people watching commercials. There is already a new trend in some reality shows to show little 30-60 second pieces in the middle of a commercial break. Also with our DVR, when we are fast forwarding, and then press play, it goes back 30 seconds automatically (just started doing this within the last year) so that more can be charged for the ad slot right next to the show. I am a marketing dork, so I love to watch for trends and can't wait to see what else happens in coming years.

Commercials used to be 2.5 mins. long. Last I heard, some cable networks run commercials for 6 minutes. It's basically why TV shows don't have theme songs anymore.

True, Cat. Shows ditching the theme song intro is a another sign of the times.

There isn't much on t.v. worth watching anyway......so it doesn't bother me as much.

So, Ny, are you a movie watcher or do you just avoid the tube mostly?

^^^^^ I'm not that much of a movie watcher either. At least not anymore. It's funny.......I mostly just have the t.v on just to have it on. I seriously don't know why the fuck I have cable. I watch the news, I watch TVOne and episodes of old sitcoms that I've already seen a million times (even while have the DVD collection). The one channel that I watch on a consistent basis is the Discovery Channel. Anything dealing with space, science, the Earth, wildlife, shit like that....that's what I'm into. And MSNBC with those American Greed programs. And Wheel of Fortune. And Wipeout, lol.

The girl I work out with did not even own a television. She did just get one a while ago for news. But she lived in her own apartment for over a year without a television. That blows my mind. Like you, I would need it at least for the news and back ground noise for when I am doing stuff.

Basic cable commercial time is wretched. I heard that some commercial breaks last up to six minutes, and I'm noticing that the actual program time is short. They'll come back from commercials, and then a minute later there's another break.

Try watching Discovery Fitness Channel, they show the same commercials over and over and over during the program you are watching. The Chiller Channel, when they break for commercial, you can go make a cup of coffee and clean the house and come back and the commercials will still be on.

The commercials on Chiller are ridiculous. And they edit the hell out of the shows they air just to make room for those never ending ads.

Commercials on TV can be a drag but I deal with them because they're expected. What bothers me are commercial interruptions when I'm streaming something online because they happen at random, and then it sometimes takes the program to another 5 or 10 seconds to rebuffer.

Most of the time we watch DVRs of our shows so we can breeze through the commercials. It's a drag when we do watch something live because we can't fast forward.

Quote :

How Much TV Commercial Length has Grown over the Years:

We all accept commercials as a necessary evil because they pay for the shows we love to watch. But, how much is commercial time is reasonable to accept? This question was answered for me while watching a 2004 episode of Star Trek Enterprise. The commercials came so often and lasted so long that is was almost impossible to maintain a sense of continuity with the show.

This situation got me wondering about how much the percentage of time given to a show is lost to commercials has increased over the years. Thanks to the availability of video recordings of past shows this was easy to determine. Scouring my video library I found shows ranging from 1952 to 2004. Here's what I discovered:

1952 - 13 percent of the time was spent watching commercials (only 4 minutes out of every half hour!)

1958 - 13 percent

1964 - 18 percent

1977 - 18 percent

1994 - 24 percent

2004 - 30 percent

2006 - 30 percent

2007 - 30 percent

2008 - 32 percent

2009 - 30 percent

2010 - 32 percent


These were all for main line shows aired during prime time hours.

So, how did the show that kicked this little study off do? Would you believe that a full 35 percent of the air time given to Star Trek Enterprise in 2004 was sacrificed to commercials? It was, and to make matters worse the end credits were pushed into the far right margin to make room for a side bar ad, the station logo was continually displayed in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and twice an annoying pop up add appeared in the left hand corner of the screen during the show. Taking these into account the total effective commercial time was crowding 38 percent. That means only 62 percent of the time was available to watch the show.

Another aspect of modern television that increases the commercial time, though not as distracting as actual commercials, is the "imbedded commercial." This is where a character uses or displays a product in such a way that the brand is clearly evident. Cars and soft drinks are the two most common users of this technique.

Dates are useful bookmarks of significant turning points in history. As far as commercials are concerned, February 2, 2006 will be an important and depressing day to remember. It was a Thursday night and I was watching Smallville when the imbedded commercial evolved from being covert (hidden) to overt (obvious.) Up to this time every imbedded commercial I'd seen was low-profile in nature: you had to look for it to see it. In this particular episode of Smallville, the object of the imbedded commercial was Acuview contact lenses. Instead of just discretely displaying the box, the actress held it up, label pointed directly at the camera, and said in a clear loud voice that Acuview contacts had solved a big problem for her. Only more disturbing than the clumsy and amateurish way it was done was the fact that this marked a major turning point in commercial television. If consumers let this catch on then such imbedded commercials could become so prevalent that the shows between commercials may soon become little more than multiple-product infomercials.

I kept an eye on the 2007-2008 season and am happy to report that the blatantly imbedded commercial did not proliferated. Yes, characters still park cars so that the make and model are clearly visible, but they don't use dialog to draw attention to it.

Correction: During a 2008 summer episode of Eureka, the lead star picked up a deodorant dispenser in such an awkward way to keep the label facing the camera that is was insultingly obvious it was a commercial. Worse still, this was a science fiction show in which the actor was caught in a repeating time loop. That's right, the viewer was forced to watch the clumsy bit of imbedded commercialization every time the time loop repeated.