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Comment by muyuu | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting if stereotypical ;)

In France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, shows air usually very timely... These are the countries Greece is usually compared to. Commercials in Spain and France (that I know of) are heavily regulated and monitored.

This leaves me intrigued about Greek TV.

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This has made me think about what happens here in Germany: All the main TV channels start their big show of the night at 20:15 (but I guess due to competition for viewers sometimes a channel will start their show one or two minutes earlier). Then the main channels will often have ad breaks at the same time (I guess so they don't lose viewers zapping to other programs). This seems like a bad idea given Germany's push for green energy production, but I wonder how could the government or the energy producers persuade the TV companies to spread out their ad breaks?

The problem is not with timing of shows, but with the British obsession with tea combined with the credits of a very popular show. In a million homes there are people (2.4 million?) who are suffering tea withdrawal symptoms and they all turn their kettles on at almost the exact same time. The Germans I know would probably just get a beer or open a bottle of red wine.

20 years ago in Australia, there used to be a comedy show on the government TV channel (no ads) called the Big Gig. It was a live show, but people claimed it was pre-recorded. So one of the hosts had a TV to show what was on the commercial channels to prove that they were live. Didn't quite work as planned - each of the other channels had advertisments running at the time :)

I have lived in France for 24 years, and TV shows were (in the 1990s and 2000s - not sure these days) routinely late or early by ~5 minutes or more with respect to their planned time. I totally understand why the operator needs to watch live TV to know when the show ends, given that the window of power surge is only 5 min.

I don't think it really bothers anyone here, so they haven't really tried to change it. We have a lot of live shows on all timeslots (morning, mid-day, afternoon, and night), so if each one overruns by a bit, another one must compensate. I think that might be (part of) the reason.

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