This is why I don’t watch live television anymore. After TiVo/DVR technology and DVD, I rarely, if ever, watch live television unless it involves sporting events, and tonight, NBC reminded me why. My roommate and I sat down to watch NBC’s broadcast of The Incredibles, one of the few good movies I don’t already own. Things were going fine, until the movie got within 35 minutes of the ending.
NBC proceeded to jump into two to three minute commercial breaks every SIX F**KING minutes. Literally, ever six to seven minutes (I think they made it up with a five minute stint at one point before I started counting), NBC would launch into a commercial break, completely disrupting the flow of the movie. This, people, is why network stations are struggling so much. They are so focused on their advertisers that they neglect their end customers - the viewers. Sure, NBC has a business to run, but a broadcaster’s job is to deliver quality entertaining, and NBC has clearly forgotten this. Their respect for the viewer obsolete, why should I respect or give my business (i.e. my eyes to their advertisements) to a company that does not treat me with any?
Maybe this explains why every upcoming episode of “E.R.” is the “must see” episode of the season…
Tags: advertisement, commercial, nbc, tv
Category: Miscellaneous | Comments RSS
November 29th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Actually the end customer is the advertiser as they are the one paying for the service. It is frustrating but that is the business model. The only way to be effective is to start mass boycotts of products that are in these unwanted advertisements. But that would just decrease the networks advertising dollars and force them to run cheaper to produce reality TV. I will let you decide which you would rather gouge your eyes out to…
November 29th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Hi G man,
Yes, you have a point, and I wasn’t meaning to say that advertisers weren’t the customers. But there are several businesses that work on a two-sided platform, and network television seems to be ignoring one side of the people it should be catering to. After all, audiences are clients too, because they need to attract maximum traffic to watch their shows, who in turn will go to their websites, buy merchandise, buy DVDs and so on and so forth.
August 3rd, 2008 at 12:30 pm
[…] minutes. what has network television come to? Is this the reason network television is struggling?http://blog.filmjabber.com/2007/11/25/nbc-commercial-overload/Winning Business Appeals and the Concept of Commercial …Defining &8220commercial […]