No, it’s not just you — Black Entertainment Television (BET) has been, indeed, drowning us in a flood of advertisements by condensing our favorite shows into smaller time frames. But you won’t believe the tactics they’re using to do it.
Besides chopping program segments to size, cable networks are speeding up shows, using compression technology, to make more room for advertisers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Take Stephen Cox’s experience, for example, when the pop culture author watched the Wizard of Oz on TBS last year: “Their voices were raised a notch,” he said about the 1939 classic. “It was astounding to me.”
He wasn’t imagining it. Cable networks sped up Dorothy’s yellow brick road journey “to meet audience guarantees made to advertisers and prop up revenue despite falling ad prices,” WSJ said.
While WSJ discovered that TBS is a major culprit of using compression technology, BET is the No. 1 offender. The African American-targeted cable network had the highest average time of commercial runs per hour at 24.2 minutes. TV Land follows at 22.9 minutes. Animal Planet landed in third place with 18.6 minutes and TBS follows in fourth place.
These are all well beyond the average cable commercial run of 15.8 minutes per hour.
Interestingly, many of the channels listed on WSJ’s top ad-squeezers are subsidiaries of Viacom. Besides BET, this includes MTV, TV Land, and Spike.
“It is a way to keep the revenue from going down as much as the ratings,” a top executive at a major cable programmer told WSJ. “The only way we can do it is to double down and stretch the unit load a little more.”
But the problem is that by squeezing in more commercials to counterbalance falling ratings, cable networks are exacerbating the issue, not fixing it. Who really wants to sit through an hour of programming when nearly half of it is all advertising?
“It has gotten completely out of control,” a distribution head from a major network said. “I’m concerned when you look at the performance being diminished and hurt by their running the shows that way.”
More interestingly, speeding up content may be discordant with contracts inked between networks and studios. “They are not allowed to do anything to the content. They have to run it in the way it is delivered,” the unnamed distribution chief added.
Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman spoke out against the compression practice: “It is not how it was shot, written or imagined. It wasn’t meant to be that way, so don’t make it that way.”
What do you think?
