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Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

TV is already mostly unwatchable. As people channel-surf more to avoid ads or boring TV, the TV shows try and adapt by regularly recapping what has happened before the last ad break. So they spend less time on the content and more time on ads and then recapping after the ads.

The results are poor quality shows which are even less desirable to watch.

It's hard to view it as anything other than a death spiral.

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I live in France where I wonder whether there's a law against abusive ad sequences, because they're much less intrusive:

Movies/programs start at 9pm. The ad breaks are at 9.45pm and 10.30pm. It means most movies (1.30) have only 1 ad break, series such as X-Files and 24 hours are displayed with uninterrupted episodes. Football games match this format.

At high school, those who went to Spain or UK discovered the poor state of TV in the rest of the world. We're lucky.

Must have been strange watching 24 in France, then. In the US, the time in the story was set up to align with ad breaks, so when it was XX:47 (for example) in the story, it was always 21:47 in reality.

Indeed, times didn't match. And worse: In most movies/series we can clearly see that a sequence is supposed to be a summary for people who come back from a break. Very similar experience to series you "buy on bittorrent".

I can watch a recorded episode 24 in ca 35 min. Poor Americans, watching series like these on broadcast TV makes you sit through 25 minutes of advertising (and watching US advertising makes me angry, though Americans probably think it's normal). No wonder subscription services have taken off there first.

Living in the UK with the ad-free BBC, you could always tell US import TV series because they had 45 minute slots rather than the 30 or 60 minute slots of the local content.

The first (and only) time I saw an episode of Star Trek on US television I was shocked when I realised there was a commercial break immediately after the credits. (I turned it off in the disgust.)

This is why I cringe every time I hear people badmouth the BBC. I'd pay double the licence fee for it, it's that good.

There used to be government restrictions in the US regarding how many minutes per hour broadcasters could show commercials, since TV stations were using "the public airwaves", and in most places you only had three or four channels.

But with the advent of 150+ channel cable services they decided the rationale for that kind of regulation had been undermined.

> TV shows try and adapt by regularly recapping what has happened before the last ad break

This Mitchell and Webb sketch shows this off perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc

When they do this they ruin the experience watching it later on DVR/Netflix/DVD/etc.

and its the worst when you buy a season of a show that does the recaps. "WE'll be right back", "Before the break..." so you get about 10 minutes of real content per show.

One of the worst offenders of this is MythBusters in my opinion. Thankfully, I recently found streamlined-edits of MythBusters.

This happens on the BBC (which is ad-free) & it drives me mad! E.g. Dragons' Den is clearly pre-formatted to be sold to commercial channels with ad breaks - there is about 20 mins of content in a 1 hour show w/ 40 mins of recaps and dramatic panning around the 'Den'.

Martha Stewarts cooking (show on ad free PBS) has a tacked on "Bonus Feature" at the end that seems to be just the right amount of time that it wouldn't be needed if they were showing ads.

I'd never clocked that, but all the BBC's nature programs have a 15 minute "making of" documentary at the end as well, which now you mention it must get cut for commercial networks.

In case anyone is wondering:

https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths

Nova, Discovery, History Channel, Airline Disasters, etc. All of them (I view via YouTube / YT Download).

For Airline Disasters, skipping forward to 20 minutes skips most of the useless pre-accident crap with 5x replays of all critical moments. Annoying as fuck.

That should be a service. You don't download the show, you just download a cut list as a text file that makes your DVR skip all that junk. I'd pay.

https://www.reddit.com/r/smyths

I'll just throw this here.

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