TV Networks Stuff in More Commercials Despite Vows to Cut Back
The amount of commercial time on cable TV keeps increasing as networks try to make up for shrinking audiences by stuffing more ads into every hour of television. That’s despite years of promises to cut back on ads. Last quarter, commercial time rose 1%, according to Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC. After declining in 2017, the volume of ads increased every quarter last year and expanded again in the first half of 2019, he said.
As TV viewership declines and more consumers jump to streaming services like Netflix, media companies have only a couple of options to generate the advertising revenue that Wall Street expects: They can raise prices, run more commercials or do a little of both. “Look at the decline in ratings,” Nathanson said. “Everyone’s got pressure to make their quarterly numbers. Long-term, it’s a very bad decision, but you don’t want to miss your numbers and have your stock go down.”
The big issue isn’t the total amount of commercial time -- but the long breaks that viewers must endure, Shimmel said. “If you have to wait six minutes for your content to come back in a world where people have remotes and can quickly switch to Netflix or Hulu, that exacerbates the issue,” he said. Too many commercials probably isn’t the main reason people cancel their cable-TV service, he said. “But it’s definitely in the top five.”
Long-term, the creeping increase in ad loads should be a worry. Nathanson’s firm surveyed consumers and found that “the No. 1 reason people like Netflix is because it’s commercial-free.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/tv-networks-stuff-in-more-commercials-despite-vows-to-cut-back?srnd=premium
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My wife and I quit about ten years ago. No cable, no satellite, no broadcast. Our television plays DVDs and Netflix. That's all it does. Occasionally we rent DVDs from the neighborhood Redbox.
These days there's no way in hell I'd suffer television again. You'd have to strap me to a chair and hold my eyes open like this:
wikipedia
The television in our oldest kid's home is as dumb as ours, and like us they don't have cable, satellite or broadcast.
They don't even leave the television remote out. When they want to turn the television on or off, they walk up to it and push the power button. Everything else they control from their phones via a chromecast dongle. I don't know what streaming services they subscribe to, but Netflix is one. Netflix is the only television we have in common with our children.
If traditional advertising supported television isn't picking up younger viewers it's doomed as a business model. My mother-in-law and my dad still watch television news but none of their children or grandchildren do.
It's possible I'm too cheap to subscribe to any other streaming services. An inexpensive DSL connection, which my wife and I would have anyways, and an $8.99 a month Netflix subscription is about as far as I want to go. I'm intrigued by the upcoming Star Trek Picard on CBS streaming, but won't subscribe to that. Eventually it will turn up at our library or some other source. I might even be willing to pay a few dollars for it, and it alone. But if it doesn't show up elsewhere it won't bother me. Their loss, not mine.
What money I don't waste on television I probably spend on electronic books, newspapers, and magazines.
