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Hulu Announces Offline Download Feature Will Include Ads for Users on $7.99/Month Plan
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Nice! More choice for those long international flights.
I recently re-subscribed to Hulu (commercial-free) after a longer pause because they have some new shows I want to watch (including the second season of Handmaid's Tale) and because they have an offer to get HBO as an add-on for $5 for 6 months. It's a good service and well worth the money IMO.
I recently re-subscribed to Hulu (commercial-free) after a longer pause because they have some new shows I want to watch (including the second season of Handmaid's Tale) and because they have an offer to get HBO as an add-on for $5 for 6 months. It's a good service and well worth the money IMO.
If you carefully read our own quoted article the commercial time per hour and 1/2 is well within the time frames I stated in my original post. But also you can use common sense and look at the run time of first run TV shows and see a 1 hr show on TV is about 45 min as a iTunes commercial-free download. A 30 min. show is about 20 mins.
It's very convenient that he used % which distorts reality but actually is not inconsistent with what I originally wrote AND also that he mixes 1hr shows and 30 min shows which can't really be compared. 30 min shows have more ad time than hour shows so not directly comparable.
The bottom line here is that a one hour show had about 15 min of ads in the early 80s and still does today. If they snuck in 30 seconds here or there it's really immaterial, esp. in the advent of DVRs where you don't even have to watch the ads -- but you pay for that convenience. Otherwise someone has to pay the bills, right? All that staff scrolling at the end of the show and on-camera talent doesn't come for free.
The % seems like a better way to represent the difference when it comes to smaller numbers. A 3 minute difference won't come off as much, but when it represents 10% of the time from a 30 minute show, that puts in a more accurate perspective.
Having seen downloads of all kinds of shows over the past couple of decades where commercials are cut out, I can certainly say that the length of those shows has decreased. There are some more recent 30 minute shows that clock in with barely around 18 minutes of the actual show for an episode, while for the most part they used to be closer to a 22 minute range a decade or so ago.
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The link I quoted was to show that an increase of commercial length over time exists. Which it does.
About the times you posted as commercial times from the 70's, look at any popular TV show over 20 years old, and the lengths of those shows are a few minutes longer than popular shows from today.
Yea, this pretty much just explains it.
The link also talks about extreme product placement that is built into the shows. Sometimes this is done tastefully, but many times, especially lately, it is awkward and disrupts the flow of the show.
Also, what makes you think that a 30 min TV show has that much more % of commercials than an hour long one? I think your numbers might be a little off, slightly too short for 30 minute shows, and too long by a few minutes on hour long ones.
Based off of you saying that 30 min shows are about 20 minutes, and hour long shows are about 45 minutes, when excluding the commercials. These numbers are not correct. From what I looked up, modern shows have about 19-22 minute long episodes for 30 minute shows, and about 41-43 minutes for hour long ones.
Examples I quickly found of shorter hour long shows was the 8th season of Psych which almost every episode is 42 minutes, 5th season of Fringe which almost every episode was 43 minutes, 16th season of Law and Order which most episodes were 43 minutes, but a few were 44.
Besides, all this doesn't really matter for the link that C DM posted, because almost every show that was used for the % was an hour long, not 30 minutes. If you scroll down, they give a list of shows used by year.
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Yea, I have noticed this too.
What is worse is when reruns are aired now, older shows are edited to allow more time for commercials. Sometimes this is done in good compromising way, by having the ending credits is a tiny block in the corner of the screen while the commercials play.
Other times, parts of the show are removed to fit the commercials in.
Yes, but those extra minutes in older shows was opening credit and closing credit. That's 1.5 minutes of non-show show. Today's show mostly have a cold open. If they have a them it's no more than Older one hour shows also had 1 minute+ "last time" refreshers. Today IF a show has one it's a few seconds. For example Modern Family's open is about 10 seconds. Compare to Happy Day which was over a minute for a 30 min. show. The actual show content time really hasn't materially changed... or the commercials.