I was watching a bunch of commecials on TV today and in between, they showed a few minutes of the Indy 500. Am I the only one disgusted with TV nowadays. I thought coverage of the race was horrible. Five commercials in a row and when they came back they spent 30 seconds promoting future shows. Brent Mussberger should retire. His interview with the 96 year old Son of the first 500 winner was a waste of time. At least I had the Sunday paper to read. I pay $100 a month for this sattelite dish BS and I STILL have to suffer through commercials. I live in a valley but I think I might run some co-ax cable up the hill behind my place and erect a really high antena. OK rant over. Time for a nap.

NO.

Now youtube is loaded with commercials, and I am starting to get spam shit on my cell phone. No matter what we the citizens do to get away from it, they will find us and shove their crap down our throats<_<

Yup

and millions time LOUDER!
my hearings aids has the POWER to deliver
blowing my brain out
commerical is over, back to the tube........

Same thing here in Canada, but get this, they black out your ads and insert Canadian ones! I find I just end up watching 2 programs to get away frm the commercials, ssoner or later the marketing gurus will figure out we are doing that. Appreciate your rant, and I feel the same as you.

Ian Stott
Moncton
Canada

Well just to step it up a notch, I sat down last night to catch up on the last couple episodes of House using the " on demand " feature. Now FOX has gotten Comcast to disable the fast forward feature for their shows ( at least House ) so I couldn't fast forward through the fucking commercials when watching on demand shows

DVR is the solution.

For any "live" event, seclude yourself from the outside world for a period of time proportional to the length of the event, then start watching and FF through the commercials.

I do this for Steeler games. I start watching about 45 minutes into the game and FF through time between plays, timeouts, TV timeouts, commercials, half time.

I absolutely agree, I hate the commercials that have become so obnoxious. However, I did work for Universal Studios, developing and supporting their TV Rights Licensing systems for a little more than 8 years. These are the systems that the studios use to sell their catalog content to TV broadcasters across the planet.

The problem is how to monetize your productions. The coverage at the Indy 500 cost whomever broadcast it millions of dollars in cameras, support teams and on-screen meat puppets. The options are to accept advertising or to charge the end-user (us) directly. I'm sure that you're all fmiliar with Pay Per View, Because charging for the content discourages most viewers, you've got to charge more to the ones that are willing to pay. You do that and a single 3 hour event will cost the end user $20-30. Many PPV events don't make as much from the broadcast fees as they plan for.

But what about my cable bill? Doesn't that pay for content? Even the pay stations like HBO only get a couple of bucks per subscriber per month. They've got to put 720 hours (30 days x 24hrs) of content on the air. Even with tens of millions of subscribers, the total money is only enough to carry a handfull of new content. A regular cable network like USA or TNT has to do the same thing with just a few cents per customer per month.

We have grown accustomed the major networks being "free". Any time a network tries to collect any money from the distribution side of things, like charging your cable company to carry their signal, they are met with incredible resistance. "Free" TV has become a right, not a priveledge. Luckily, big companies are willing to spend ridiculous amunts of money to put their 30 seconds of LOUD propaganda in the middle of the shows that you like to watch. It's a pain for us, but without it, we would get no show.

The TV industry is actually struggling as more viewers are going towards the 'net. Some of those distruibution channels don't provide any money back to the content's producers, or if they do, the money is greatly reduced. That will only lead to inferior product. Hopefully, they will figure the whole thing out, because the demand for varied content is only going up. It will get made only if there is a reasonable return on the production investment.

So while I hate the commercials as much as the rest of you, they are a neccessary evil. And I use my DVR to skip them when I can. So I advise you to figure out a way to live them, because it seriously beats the alternatives.

The alternative is not watching. Which is getting easier and easier to do.

TiVo.

I hate "Product Placement" more, especially in movies.

I haven't turned on the TV in years. It's a waste of time! Try going a few days or a week without watching TV.

not indy but;
http://www.youtube.com/user/bretgin#p/a/u/1/oCIL0Lt7z84
and
http://www.youtube.com/user/bretgin#p/a/u/0/HHo6I7iM8Ng

Way Cool Jeff .... way cool

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!

I need me some of that Super Shell.

I don't watch TV nearly as much as I used to. We've subscribed to a satellite TV company for a long time, but over the years, they've changed the programming, took away channels we used to get, and constantly broadcast re-runs on the channels we still do get. I'm tired of paying for channels we don't want as well: BET, all the foreign language channels, etc. ...

Not only do the commercials imbedded in the regular programming suck (10~15 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of the 'show'), but their audio engineering staffs appear to be on constant coffee break - commercials are either too loud, or at ultra low levels.

After a certain time at night, even the channels that did contain decent programs switch over to 'paid advertising' (info-mercials).

It's ridiculous what we pay them for what we get in return.

Agree....the other day I timed the actual content of the morning news on channel 4 in SF....in one hour they delivered just over 33 minutes of live feed....and even then they were doing promos for "upcoming stories" BS I say.........

well, looking at the post above it looks like like the numbers may have changed a little.

10 years ago I worked in film and tv. A 1/2 hour tv show then was 22 minutes and a one hour show was 40 minutes. The optimum for a movie was 1 hour 42 minutes so that it could go on tv as either a 2 hour or 2 and a half hour show.

I still video tape every race I watch and then fast forward though the commercials. With the boring parts cut out I can watch a 3 hour NASCAR race in just slightly over one hour.

I agree that DVR, video tape or some other means of editing is the only way to go.

When TV is gone, which I think will be in the not to distant future, most of us won't miss it. If its really about running programming 24/7 then maybe the stations need to go back to the old ways and just go off the air for ten or twelve hours at night like they used to.

Kart54

Kart54

... and I'm still pissed about all the little analog pocket TV's we have (we used to have one in the glove box of every vehicle and then some) that are now useless.

I bought a small 7" digital TV last year to carry around. Yes, there are more channels to watch now, but the pix suck (pixelate) and for the most part, the audio sucks (the Max Headrom effect and out of sync) when you move around. The old analog TV's worked pretty good, even in a moving car (with a good antenna).

are you doing watching TV while driving??

now i gotta clean my moniter of dinner
Touche' L ee it!

Yeah the commercials are very frustrating.
But I pacify myself by thinking back to a time when there was virtually no racing on TV.
When I was growing-up my dad and I would decide ahead of time if we wanted to listen to Indy on the radio live, or wait and watch it on delayed TV broadcast as though it were live.
Racing in general and Indy in particular are a big deal to my dad. I inherited that love, so I think it's great that now my dad and I can watch Indy live on tv with 8 million camera angles and pretty good pit coverage.

The commercials do suck, but at least we can watch races on TV. Every F1 race, MotoGP, some World of Outlaws, an occasional USAC race and ofcourse lots and lots of NASCAR. Plus there are the news shows; Speed Vision and Dave Despain to keep us up to date. It didn't use to be that way. In the old days I had to wait for National Speed Sport News (R.I.P) to find out what the hell was going on in the world of racing.

BTW, I thought Indy was one hell of a race this year, from bump day to the race itself. I sure feel for that kid from California!

I can't wait for On Demand style TV to take over. I'm fine with commercials as long as the show is well done. Unfortunately, all the reality TV, coupled with the changes in advertising, is driving studio to cut things like writing, acting, and effects.

GOOD shows like Stargate Universe, Arrested Development, and Firefly get cut because they're not in the top 5 shows from their first episode. I would pay upfront for seasons of those shows. I paid $50 each for Stargate Universe season on iTunes. Just like buying the DVD box set later, only you get the shows as they are aired. Brilliant.

I really liked Arrested Development, and was very dissappointed when it got cancelled. It's sad that the networks just don't give quality shows much time to develop an audience.
I was on pins and needles worrying that "Lost" would get cancelled after season 2 when it's ratings were borderline.

I don't, but the Minister of Travel does sometimes when we're on the road. Plus 'breaking news' reports seem to hit the local TV channels before the AM radio stations get around to broadcasting them ... Ding Dong

You mean the Minister of Travel, Defense, Finance and Entertainment?