My dad rented from Netflix the first couple seasons of Magnum PI. The nice thing about watching TV shows on DVDs is that there are no commercials. I noticed that the (nominally hour-long) shows are about 50 minutes long without commercials, so 1/6 of the time was devoted to commercials back in the 1980s when the shows were made. In contrast, today's TV shows are 1/3 commercials, meaning a nominally hour-long show made today would be 40 minutes of content.
Thus, it seems that the commercial TV networks are becoming greedier as time goes on. DVRs like Tivo are a natural response to this trend. I read that really old shows would incorporate advertised products with their content, so commercial breaks were not present to the degree they are now. The situation is analogous to the banner ads and pop-ups of websites. Google, myway.com, and others wisely concluded that people hate such clutter and interruptions, and by making the user's experience better, those sites became more popular
Following Google's approach, I think the most customer-friendly way to running a TV station would be to charge nothing of viewers and have relevant commercials that only appear at the beginning and ends of shows. Long movies may have intermission breaks too. (PBS is similar to this model, though it relies on donations and pledge drives more.) More people would watch such stations, and that would offset the reduction in ad revenue due to fewer commercial breaks.
Posted by seander at July 28, 2005 08:38 AM