Sunday, June 20, 2004

Too Many Commercials

Well, this is interesting. Several Wall Street brokerages have downgraded the larger radio stocks (excluding Clear Channel Communications). The reason for the downgrade is the glut of advertising on commercial radio stations, up to 25 minutes per hour on some networks.


I'm sure that the RIAA will blame the music pirates for the devaluation of these radio stocks, and the resulting decrease in ad revenues.


When will advertising people realize that there is a limit to the number of ads we will listen to, or watch on TV?


Advertising companies revolted against the TiVo because it allowed people to skip over commercials, which was one of the selling points of the units. They made the same complaint about VCRs.


Last year, when the Hallmark cable network got the rights to broadcast M*A*S*H, they broadcast the entire series once with all deleted scenes (the scenes were deleted to create more time for ads), and those 30 minutes episodes lasted 45 minutes. When the Science Fiction Network broadcast the digitally remastered Star Trek episodes, the one hour shows from the 60s expanded to 90 minutes, and the network still interrupted the show in the middle of acts to sell commercials. The Original Series was done in four acts, but SciFi made the show an 8 act show. Now SciFi broadcast the Original Series with the same deleted scenes that were broadcast on the local stations. Same with Hallmark and M*A*S*H.


We don't want spam in our email inbox, and we don't want it on our TVs either.

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