Turner Network Television spent today playing all three Lord of the Rings movies in unison with “limited commercial interruption.” For a Lord of the Rings nerd like myself, this could have been a pretty sweet event. But there are two major issues that prevent me from truly enjoying this showing.
I should note that TNT is still playing these movies as I write this and that they’re almost done with the second one, but I’ll go on anyway.
The first – and most annoying – problem is that each time TNT comes back from a commercial break they give you about 2 seconds of the film and then they go back to commercials. Someone screwed something up in the control room or with the automatic commercial settings or something. So not only do you miss about a minute or two of the movie at the end of each commercial break, you’re subject to more commercials!
And the second problem is that if today’s programming reflects what “limited commercial interruptions” means in the current cable television market then this market is in trouble. While I appreciate the effort of the folks at TNT to put on a day’s worth of programming that I enjoy, there certainly did not seem to be less commercials than any other day. Perhaps limited interruptions means that while there are less commercial breaks, the breaks are longer than normal. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics.
All I know is that I expected less commercials and not to have a few seconds of the film only to be thrown back into the commercials again!
Yeah, I noticed that problem, too. I’ve also noticed it with the radio down here. There are a couple stations that promote “50 minutes of music” or “fewer commercial breaks than the other guys”, but they pull the same shenanigans. They give you about 35 minutes of nonstop music, then pause for about 2 minutes to give a few commercials, and then it’s back to the music. However, at about 10 til the top of the hour, they will make up for it and play nearly 8 minutes of nonstop commercials. You gotta believe they lose nearly all of their listening audience. Who really wants to sit through that?
Right – they swindle you into listening to the commercials. It’s like the problem that I have with The Howard Stern Show and their 15 minute non-show content breaks. I call them “non-show content breaks” because they give you a 2-minute lead out with some prank phone call, a 4 or 5-minute Howard 100 News update, 5-minutes of commercials, and then 3 or 4-minutes of a musical/prank phone call lead-in before you get back to the show.
For a service that you pay for, that’s ridiculous.
I had a professor one time who told the class that he called his cable company and asked them to turn off the commercials. The woman on the phone was like, “Huh?” And he explained that he’s paying a lot of money each month for the cable channels so he does not need to be advertised to via the commercials…please turn them off. The cable company didn’t know how to respond!
HAHAHA! I think I may try that!
Here in Silicon Valley they broadcast it on Comcast with commercials three times an hour, but none of the “few seconds” stuff described above. There was a good 20 minutes of part 2 that had bad encoding (staticky audio). I don’t think we would have tolerated watching it had they done such commercials.