Originally posted by Adrian Wallace:
Aussie TV has (I suspect) about twice as much adertising content as UK! programs designed to take 1 hour on BBC take 1 hour 20 and programms designed for a 1 hour slot on ITV channels seem to take up 1 hour 10...
That must be bad. Here a recent report found that both Sky and ITV are daily breaking the law in terms of how much time is spent on adverts. The fines are so tiny that they can carry on doing it. I've noticed that Star Trek (yes, I'm a nerd) takes 40 mins on BBC and an hour on Sky.
(Discovery channel has a short break every 5 minutes and a break for between 5 and 10 minutes between programs!)
The silliest thing I saw was a live boxing match with adverts between every round. It got very frustrating seeing adverts every 4 minutes. Could be worse though - a group of German companies tried to get the German football authorities to change the game from halves into thirds to allow for extra adverts in televised games.
Another annoying trend is for so called "News" programs to be full of advert content
Its quite worrying really - with commercial TV companies receiving large amounts of money from advertisers, how do we know that the content of the programmes are not effected? Its not hard to imagine a producer of a news programme being pressured not to report a story about corporation X making a dodgy product if X also pays large amounts in sponsorship to that channel. Even worse when that corporation supports a particular political party.
News programmes also seem to be increasingly having sponsors for parts of their programme e.g. "Today's weather is shown in conjunction with Ultimate Umbrellas, the top class umbrella warehouse!". The local weather on ITV used to have about 30 seconds of introductionary gumph about the sponsor followed by a 10 second long weather summary.
The other annoying thing is how the commercial channels broadcast their programmes at a lower volume to the adverts, meaning that the adverts sound louder. You can be quite happily sleeping in front of Miss Marple when suddenly a DFS advert comes on at full volume and wakes you up
