Just in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been on a sabbatical for the past month due to illness. I don’t want to get into that too much, as we all have our problems, but suffice it to say that I’ve been pretty much confined to my home and unable to do my normal chores around the house. That means I’ve spent quite a lot of time in my recliner watching television, which includes more and more time watching commercials these days. Let me explain.
As you know, this is the time of the year for Christmas movies, of which I’ve seen several over the past few weeks. For whatever reason, a number of other classics have also been showing. The first of the Christmas-themed movies I watched was “Home Alone.” Now, the last 30 minutes of that movie has some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever seen, and it’s become a “must see” Christmas classic for me.
So, I was laid back in the recliner, armed with the remote and a glass of water, waiting patiently for the funniest and most entertaining section of the movie. At some point, it just seemed to me that the part of the movie I was anticipating was never getting there, and I also noticed the movie had passed the two hour mark and wasn’t nearly over. What was going on? That’s a rhetorical question because I had already noticed that the commercial breaks seemed endless. Me being me, I decided to begin counting the number of different commercials during each break.
What I found was a consistent number of 17 commercials during every break. Seventeen, you say? Yes, I counted commercials during four separate breaks and got the same number each time. Now, that seemed excessive to me, and explained why a movie that was less than two hours long morphed into one that lasted three hours. And the reason I dozed off before my favorite part, which made me mad at both myself and Freeform, which is a Disney product. Like they need the money. I had to get the old DVD out so I could see the end of the movie. Why wasn’t I watching the DVD to begin with? I don’t have an answer for that. It’s just one of those mysteries of life, I guess.
Anyway, after experiencing what I thought was excessive advertising on that station, I decided to check the number of ads on other networks. The first chance I had to conduct the survey was the next afternoon when I watched “The Shawshank Redemption.” The first count for the number of commercials was 12, which was better than the other movie, but still way too high to suit me. I’ll admit I lost count a time or two, but the number ended up being pretty consistent at 12 when I did concentrate and get the correct number.
I thought to myself that maybe the numbers were skewed upward when the networks were showing movies, so I decided to check for the number of commercials during regular programming. So, I went over to my favorite network HGTV and checked the numbers there. The show was “The Property Brothers,” and there were seven commercials in each break. That was much better, and only encompassed a little over two minutes, which seemed quite reasonable. Yay, HGTV! That’s another reason for it to be number one, at least in my opinion.
Too make sure I got representative numbers, I went to a couple of other networks and checked the commercial breaks. The numbers ranged from eight to 12, with movies having longer commercial breaks with more individual ads than regular programming. And to think, we thought two or three commercials were too many back in the day. I also noticed that there seemed to be more commercial breaks to go along with more commercials, which only made it worse.
Either way, whether it’s a regular show or a movie, it just seems to me that there are too many ads, especially given the fact that we’re also having to pay for cable. Then the cable companies are also required to pay the networks for programming. So, these networks are double-dipping as far I’m concerned.
Until we get true à la carte programming and only have to pay for what we watch, this kind of abuse will continue. Not sure this will ever happen, but one can dream. Of course, if you live close enough to a large city or acquire specialized equipment, it’s possible to access a number of television stations for free. But not the ones I really want, such as HGTV. Back to the dreaming.