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Comment by jackgavigan | Hacker News Reader

It astounds me how much US TV airtime is devoted to adverts - roughly 18 minutes out of every hour, AFAIK (plus any split-screen advertising shenanigans).

In the UK, (outside the BBC, which doesn't have adverts) TV broadcasters are limited to an overall average of 7 minutes per hour, with limits of 12 minutes for any individual clock hour (which drops to 8 minutes during primetime).

The BBC's Natural History unit deliberately inserts ten minutes of "disposable" content that can be cut from the program when it is broadcast on commercial channels (e.g. the 'Yellowstone People' segments that were included at the end of episodes of 'Yellowstone' when it was broadcast on the BBC, but are dropped when it's broadcast on commercial channels).

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It's more nuanced than that, those are tighter rules for ITV1, C4, C5.

The other channels, including the "freeview" offerings can have more advertising:

(Other services) 1.1.2(B) (a) The total amount of spot advertising in any one day must not exceed an average of nine minutes per hour (15 per cent) of broadcasting.

(b) This may be increased by a further three minutes per hour (5 per cent) devoted to teleshopping spots, but this additional 5 per cent must not be used for other forms of spot advertising.

This doesn't at all change your point of course, we have good tight advertising laws in the UK, including a complete ban on any product placement whatsoever. (There was talk about loosening this rule, but I haven't seen evidence that happened to any significant degree.)

There certainly is product placement in the UK - see [1]. When watching these shows you'll see an opaque 'PP' logo flash up on the screen to let you know.

[1] https://www.itvmedia.co.uk/advertising-opportunities/broadca...

Ah, I had read they were going to bring it in, I just didn't think it had happened yet, I guess it's been longer than I remember since I've watched commercial TV.

My favorite is when they broadcast some old TV show and because the TV show itself is so cut that they can't really cut anything out, they instead speed is up to 1.1x or 1.2x. Honestly though you can only really tell by listening to the music in the show, that's what gives it away. But yea, they make it a minute or two shorter so they can fill up more space with ads

I also find it astounding that people pay $50-60/month for a cable service that is 30% adverts.

At that ratio, the cable service should be paying them.

Same thing for the mobile web. Since I pay for data usage I am more concerned about things like video pop-up ads or even little things like web devs failing to download an ad image appropriate for the size of my screen instead of the original resolution image.

Completely agree.

I think one issue is that buying a bundle of Cable/Internet only costs a little bit more than buying Internet alone. All these Cable/Internet providers have a vested interest in getting people to watch Cable, so they overcharge substantially for just buying [rather slow] Internet alone.

Comcast has a lower tier internet service that most of their sales people will not even mention.

I wonder if the marginal value of a TV ad impression declines as the number of ads per hour goes up.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy, but there's this:

http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/commerciallength.htm

So, instead of 5 extra minutes of ads, you get 5 extra minutes of bad content. Is that a win?

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