what is "TV"?

A one hour show collapses to 42 minutes when you bypass the commercials. If you bypass the shilling of what's coming "after the break", it's significantly less with some shows.

The most annoying for me is the "news". They don't need to tell me what they are going to tell me. Why don't they just spend that time telling me?

Sadly i've even noticed this with a lot of PBS specials. An hour show might actually be 56 minutes, but once you remove all the material that's repeated over and over again it collapses to 20 minutes or less.

Are they that desperate for material?

Anything we want to watch is pre recorded. The ads are much more bearable at 30x.

@John Dennis-
"The most annoying for me is the "news". They don't need to tell me what they are going to tell me. Why don't they just spend that time telling me?"

One of my pet hates as well.

At the risk going slightly OT.
News ads are the most annoying and in poor taste when they announce it like its a great story we can't wait to here, like a cure for cancer.
But instead it quite often sounds like..... (think animated excited voice)
"And coming up after the break, A man watches his family burn alive in a horror day on the roads. Dont go away, we'll be right back! "

:(

+1 thoughtless ads in news and more so documentaries - think famine doco broken up by ads for macdonalds, kfc, etc.,

The broadcast transmission infrastructure was overbuilt.
Too many channels, too much available airtime.
Now we are stuck with all their insipid attempts to fill it.
Used to be, the teevee went off after the 9pm news.
We could choose between two channels when the weather was perfect.

I cancelled TV several years ago. The only thing we really miss is the news. Everything else we can find on the internet in the way of Netflix, CNN, weather, etc.

When we stay in hotel it's always a big joke about "oooohh we have TV!" Then after about an hour it's the same old stuff and we remember why we cancelled in the first place.

Regards,

Kimberly

you don't REALLY need "news" either as it is just depressing gossip about people you don't know or need to care about. but it is a hard habit to break. I offer people $100 to avoid it for a month, but no takers so far.
I've avoided it for about 5 years now and life is SOOO MUCH NICER!!

The best way to watch TV these days is on 'catch up'. For some reason, they take most of the commercials out, leaving maybe one or two - which I then FF through anyways. :-)

Anything by the AP/Routers suffers from the same formula as most TV shows.

Personally I liked certain scripted shows. Heck, RealTV (replaced by Max TV I think) has more content in their 30 minute "show" years ago then most non-scripted shows do today.

Our Tivo is so intertwined into our viewing habit that it's almost instinctive to get to the commercials and go click, click, click for multiple 30-second skips. In a few seconds, back to the entree. The box has been set up to record a lot of stuff. Now I find it irritating to have to watch a commercial. If live, we just pause it and actually have a conversation for a few minutes.

I just bought a Roku box for additional content. Egads! Commercials that I can't skip through!

why ROKU over CHROMECAST? I'm looking at both for some new gear fun, just curious about pluses and minuses

Google it; lots of reviews of pros/cons of both units.

In our case, the living-room TV is a giant DLP model that doesn't have HDMI, which would be needed with Chromecast. We have a Roku2 unit, which can also deliver plain old analog video.

What I really want is a device that can deliver Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Our cable company bundles it with a bunch of other stuff for a significant upcharge, so no go. I'm not that "old" but I really enjoy the hundreds (thousands?) of old films that had great storylines. And, frankly, I'm really tired of synthetic digital explosions and the like.

In Australia we had the opportunity to avoid the over-supply of channels that occurred in the US, as with the conversion from analog to digital, we went from 5 channels/networks to 20+ almost overnight.

However at least two and possible three of those networks now broadcast exactly the same content on two or more channels, in one case, on three channels. Add to that the TV shopping and just plain advertisement channels, and we now have a world-class system of complete rubbish.

Along the way, the requirement setting out the maximum length of a commercial break was quietly dropped, leaving it possible to run full-time commercials. Then the local-content rules, which set the minimum amount of local programming was dumped, making it possible to make programs that are essentially nothing more than program length 'infomercials'.

'Reality TV' programs then qualified for local-content, cheap to make and of no entertainment value at all, with the result that most nights I can look at the program guide and not find a single program I am interested in watching.

We do of course have a single pay TV provider (it quietly swallowed up all its competitors), but it simply provides many channels of the same recycled rubbish that is available on free-to-air, so there is little point in subscribing.

And not for the first time, we now look to British programming to find the only palatable drama material, as the local stuff, what little exists, has no sophistication any more.

Sad times.

Classic movies? I suggest the http://www.criterion.com/library/expanded_view?b=CriterionCriterion Collection[/link] . Of course you have to buy the Blu-Ray or DVD, but I'm fine with that.

Yes, Jenny Brockie's otherwise excellent Insight program on SBS now suffers from this malady. And I HATE the background: was it shot in some notorious old jail?

It's for people with Alzheimers.

Incredibly irritating, usually in 'reality' programs - each of the often 4 story-lines essentially gets repeated maybe 4 times in the half-hour.

It's for people with Alzheimers.

geoff

Geoff said that it's for people with Alzheimers.

I also say that it's for people with Alzheimers.

I will say that it's for people with Alzheimers.

What is Alzheimers?

erm, what am i doing here?