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Notice more TV ads lately? You're not imagining it.
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. Fox was the only major cable network group to lower its ads last quarter, cutting them by 2%, Nathanson 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."
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 05 2019, @03:56PM
Supposedly there was some furor some time ago about the volume differentials and how it was agreed that it would discontinue but then the ad agencies started using compression to stay within the technical requirements and yet still deliver louder volumes on ads.
Shows don't necessarily fade out to black anymore, either, or one could use that to sleep out with a 'wake up' refresh when the Parental Guidelines logos are detected. One can't rely on in-band messaging either. Maybe have a button to manually suppress out with the automatic wakeup from the v-chip? (But using a DVR and just fast forwarding the ads would likely be easier). Have no idea if it is actually viable or being developed but here is one website [skipr.tv] of someplace apparently still trying to develop technology along this end.
This sig for rent.