Posted on 2006-01-17 08:54:40, modified on 2006-01-17 10:40:33
Tags: Rant, Mass Media
As the saying goes, the content on commercial television station is to fill up the time between commercials. And I've seen some sad examples of this here in Australia.
On free-to-air television in Australia you have seven channels:
With the rise of digital television, the ABC and SBS have taken the opportunity to improve the variaty of their content by taken a second, digital only, channel. The other channels are just re-broadcasting their normal channel.
The source for my decision, and this rant, lies in a single movie I tried to watch: The Battle of Britain. It's a historical movie, an old movie, slow in acting and in progress of the storyline, But it's a movie I wanted to watch because of the change in my cultural environment. Like I said, it's a slow movie, taking 45 minutes what these days gets pushed in 10 minutes of lousy acting and bad camera work. But these 45 minutes get interrupted by at least four commercials, taking you out of the careful orchestrated mood of looming battles and the upcoming darkness to a happy world of home loans, end-of-year sales and dieting products. At that moment the mood is totally scattered. After the first commercial you try to get into the magic of the movie again, but something is missing. The darkness doesn't come back so black, the upcoming battles don't seem to be so serious. Next commercial, and you wonder how many of them will be there before the end of the movie, and more importantly, how much more damage they will do to the movie. Next commercial, and the TV was turned off...
How can the commercial television stations ruin movies like this without getting serious problems with their conscience?
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| Posted on: | 2006-01-19 09:09:27 |
| Comment | If you are that concerned about the movie, you should probably buy it. Seriously, though, ad-subsidised content is not going to go away. I do, however, have a suggestion. I don't know about Australia, but here, PVRs (a-la TiVo) are gaining momentum. My TV consumption habits have completely changed since I got one. Now instead of "channel surfing" and looking for something half decent among the crap, I simply flag whatever upcoming shows I see and would be interested in on whatever channels I'm subscribed to, right in my PVR's tv guide. Then I leave it alone for a while and do other more productive things. When I have time to burn on video/content, I turn on the TV and typically watch the stream (or a part of the stream) of stuff I recorded, and hop through commercials. |
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