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Commercials on TV opinion question

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David67

Would Y'all be for moving all commercials to a 1-2 hour commercial block every day? It would free Television programs and Sports from commercial interruptions. I think this is done or has been done in Europe.
 
David67 said:
Would Y'all be for moving all commercials to a 1-2 hour commercial block every day? It would free Television programs and Sports from commercial interruptions. I think this is done or has been done in Europe.
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Given that my wages are paid by a commercial TV station, no.....

Seriously, that move would reduce the value of TV commercial time to the point where most if not all commercial TV stations would become economically unviable. If you did the same thing with underwriting I'm not sure PBS could survive either.
 
Though it would be great for viewers, advertisers would not like it. Viewership during those "commercial hours" would decrease to nothing. After all, who wants to sit through an hour of commercials?
 
Absolutely not. No one would buy the time, thus the quality of the programs themselves would be roughly that of YouTube.
 
About 20 years ago, one of the Bay Area's secondary PBS stations (KCSM in San Mateo, if I remember correctly) experimented with commercials for about 3 minutes of each hour, before and after programming - as a funding alternative to those periodic pledge break weeks. The station was having a hard time getting enough funding, being a poor cousin to big-guns KQED in San Francisco and KTEH in San Jose.

They accepting only informational-type commercials (not hard-sell ads). I thought it was a worthy experiment, but it was abandoned. It's worth noting that since then, those PBS "major funding provided by..." announcements have become like mini-commercials.

But an hour a day block of commercials - no - nobody would watch. It's one thing to watch a half-hour infomercial about one product (and I rarely do that), but to watch an hour block of 30 second to 2 minute ads would be mind-numbing.

The idea is similar to those 7 to 8 minute commercial stop-sets you hear on music radio stations now. They allow the stations to play more sets of uninterrupted music ("12 in a row," and all that), but I don't think it serves the needs of the advertisers. Are you really listening to the 11th commercial in a 15 commercial block? I doubt it. I'm surprised the advertisers put up with it.
 
whitfm said:
Though it would be great for viewers, advertisers would not like it. Viewership during those "commercial hours" would decrease to nothing. After all, who wants to sit through an hour of commercials?
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Isn't an hour of commercials called two infomercials (30 min each)? All the stations do it and I'm sure virtually no one is watching. They even have channels devoted to infomercials with a wanna be network (Ion) devoting more than half their time to them.

The best infomercials IMHO are actual shows that sell ad time to pay for air time. In southern California a number of years ago James Trenton aka "The Poorman" had "Bikini Beach" where he bought infomercial air time and paid for it with sponsorship or commercials during the show. :D
 
I wish there was a website that displayed how much time per specific show was used for commercials. That would be nice to refer to. It feels like it's getting out of hand, especially for movies.
 
imhomerjay said:
Absolutely not. No one would buy the time, thus the quality of the programs themselves would be roughly that of YouTube.
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Oh so you're saying the quality of the shows would actually improve? ;D
 
I have no problems with shows like Lost, the Simpsons and others, and those would never survive under a model that doesn't pay for the content.
 
David67 said:
Would Y'all be for moving all commercials to a 1-2 hour commercial block every day? It would free Television programs and Sports from commercial interruptions. I think this is done or has been done in Europe.
Click to expand...

If it has been done in Europe, then I suspect it was done by a government-owned (or subsidized) broadcaster who was just making a bit of marginal time available to try and earn some extra revenue. If you are relying on paid ads to survive you would never make it. The idea of an buying an ad is that "X" number of people will see it (already a challenge with remote control channel flipping and VCR/TiVO editing)
 
whitfm said:
Though it would be great for viewers, advertisers would not like it. Viewership during those "commercial hours" would decrease to nothing. After all, who wants to sit through an hour of commercials?
Click to expand...
Brad Lachman would disagree with you.

If they're really good, especially the ones not seen nationwide, or not seen in this country, that works.
 
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