# Has TVLand become CommericalLand?



## fluffybear (Jun 19, 2004)

I don't typically watch TVLand but had it on this morning while helping Mrs. Fluffybear with a few chores. Anyway, during one show (Andy Griffith Show) the show ran 6 to 7 minutes of commercials for every 3 minutes of the show (7 minute commercial break, 3 minute show, 7 minute commercial break, 3 minute show, 6 minute commercial break, etc.). I thought the purpose of TVLand extending shows runtime (in this case 43 minutes) was in order to restore the shows to what was originally aired not to add yet another 15 minutes of commercials to a show!


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## Drucifer (Feb 12, 2009)

Haven't watch anything on TVland in years. They dropped airing old mystery dramas so I dropped 'em.

But looking at the guide I can see the extended time -- it is 6 minutes of additional ads per old half hour shows.


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## fluffybear (Jun 19, 2004)

Drucifer said:


> Haven't watch anything on TVland in years. They dropped airing old mystery dramas so I dropped 'em.
> 
> But looking at the guide I can see the extended time -- it is 6 minutes of additional ads per old half hour shows.


10:26 to 11:09 = 43 minutes, that's 13 minutes of extra ads to a show which is already edited for syndication (we aren't even talking about the shortened opening credits and closing credits being superimposed over the last minute of the show in order to get extra commercial time). By my calculation, the ad time exceeded the program content.

As with you I gave up watching TVLand several years back but in my case it was when they started to air shows from the 80's and 90's and calling them classics.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

Pay me $1000, I still can't find it on the dial. Never had the least bit of interest. That and Animal Planet and most Discovery networks and VH-1 are total wastes of space, as is 96% of the internet, 97% of radio, 98% of social networking, and 99% of rap music.

But cramming in commercials is nothing new. During the _Breaking Bad _marathons, episodes curiously have run times of 1:04 to 1:10. And Walt and Jesse don't seem to be speaking any slower, so how does that happen?

And virtually any syndicated program has more commercials than it did on the network. Watch _The Office _in syndication and entire scenes are missing from the NBC run, in every episode.

How many commercials = whatever the traffic will bear. Until everyone revolts and cuts the cord, anyway. If I actually had to sit through all those commercials, I would seriously think about stopping watching television altogether. As I tell our News Department whenever they get full of themselves, "you are only there so that we have something to separate the commercial breaks".


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## coolman302003 (Jun 2, 2008)

Viacom Loads More Ads on Channels _*LINK *_*(WSJ)*

With Too Many Ads, TV Land Subtracts Content _*LINK*_


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## bertman64 (Aug 25, 2007)

The only reason to watch TVLandHD is to get an old show in 1080i and the smart way is to record then FF thru the extra commercials. Take Gunsmoke for example. It is on ME-TV from OTA antenna but only in 480i and the same with Encore Westerns for the B/W episodes. Also Ginger and Mary Ann look HOT on Gilligan's Island on both TVLandHD and ME-TV at the same time but only in 1080i on TVLand!


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## fluffybear (Jun 19, 2004)

bertman64 said:


> The only reason to watch TVLandHD is to get an old show in 1080i and the smart way is to record then FF thru the extra commercials. Take Gunsmoke for example. It is on ME-TV from OTA antenna but only in 480i and the same with Encore Westerns for the B/W episodes. Also Ginger and Mary Ann look HOT on Gilligan's Island on both TVLandHD and ME-TV at the same time but only in 1080i on TVLand!


 At least with Me-TV, your getting to see more of Ginger and Mary Ann. Seeing a show in 1080i means nothing when you only get half the show.


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## Paul Secic (Dec 16, 2003)

Drucifer said:


> Haven't watch anything on TVland in years. They dropped airing old mystery dramas so I dropped 'em.
> 
> But looking at the guide I can see the extended time -- it is 6 minutes of additional ads per old half hour shows.


I Haven't watch anything on TVland in years either since they took Burns and Allen off thirty years ago.


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## Beerstalker (Feb 9, 2009)

The way I understood it TV Land is showing the old shows uncut, in their original lengths. For many of these that means a 25 minute episode for a half hour show (instead of 21 like newer shows) or a 50 minute episode for hour shows (instead of 42 min). So in order to show the same 9 minutes of ads during a half hour show they have to run it for 34 minutes instead of 30. For an hour show they have to run it for 68 minutes instead of an hour.

I'm guessing on the actual run times, but I thought that was how it was being done now.


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## fluffybear (Jun 19, 2004)

Beerstalker said:


> The way I understood it TV Land is showing the old shows uncut, in their original lengths. For many of these that means a 25 minute episode for a half hour show (instead of 21 like newer shows) or a 50 minute episode for hour shows (instead of 42 min). So in order to show the same 9 minutes of ads during a half hour show they have to run it for 34 minutes instead of 30. For an hour show they have to run it for 68 minutes instead of an hour.
> 
> I'm guessing on the actual run times, but I thought that was how it was being done now.


This would be great if they were actually showing the entire show but that does not appear to be the case with every show. In that single episode of Andy Griffith, there was over 25 minutes of commercials meaning that they were not showing the entire show but rather something that was edited down even further.


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## Church AV Guy (Jul 9, 2007)

Beerstalker said:


> The way I understood it TV Land is showing the old shows uncut, in their original lengths. For many of these that means a 25 minute episode for a half hour show (instead of 21 like newer shows) or a 50 minute episode for hour shows (instead of 42 min). So in order to show the same 9 minutes of ads during a half hour show they have to run it for 34 minutes instead of 30. For an hour show they have to run it for 68 minutes instead of an hour.
> 
> I'm guessing on the actual run times, but I thought that was how it was being done now.


I haven't watched TVLand in a while, but when I did, I was quick to realize that they were using time compression and credit overlays and STILL put the 1/2 hour shows in a 40 minute slot. I can only SUSPECT that they might have also been edited for content--I don't know for sure. I am sure of the compression, and everyone can just see the credit overlays..


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Why doesn't TV Land just give up, rebrand itself CommercialLand, and show nothing but commercials? In the meantime, if I want to watch the _Andy Griffith_ show, I'll purchase the entire series for $70 from Amazon, which is just less than what I pay now for DirecTV.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

Back in the analog days, TV shows were on tape and speeding up that tape by 8% to cram another few commercials in was cutting-edge technology. The folks I worked for thought this would be a good idea for the show _Hercules_, and embraced this technology.

With it came a whole host of problems, from alien-sounding audio to video artifacts. At that time taped shows had "black holes" which would run underneath while the MC op switched in the commercials. But speeding up the show meant that black hole that was 1:00 long was now :54 seconds long, and not only did the timing sheet now give an inaccurate time as to where that black hole was, you couldn't insert the local commercial without upcutting 6 seconds of program.

But they could live with that. What was its demise was that there were also commercials built into the taped show, known as "barter" commercials (we give the station the show at a reduced rate and they run the show including these commercials). Now a 30-second barter spot ran for 27 seconds, which turned out to be a gross violation of the rules, just like Kellogg's can't sell me a 16-ounce box of cornflakes that only has 14 ounces in it. Sponsors refused to pay for a 27-second version when they in good faith had bought 30 seconds.

It wasn't a question about the morality of the process, it took the fact that their own technology shot them in the wallet for them to finally abandon the practice.

But now, all bets are off. Every program segment stands alone as a file on a HDD, and automation can throw them at the viewers in any order or manipulate them in almost any way. This is why we have early start times (_The Voice _starting at 7:59 instead of 8 PM, for instance) and lots of little commercials and short promos shoehorned into every break, because we have the technology.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

This channel could go away and not be missed.

It wasn't so bad when they were running Retromercials, but once those were dropped and they went with the same 2-3 minute mini-informercials for zit treatments and other health care scams and legal firms trying to get people to sign up for lawsuits, it became worthless.

You just know Betty and Kirstie ain't workin' fer free, so they have to run enough ads to pay them.

---

The other problem with MeTV and AntennaTV being on OTA subchannels is that too much of their schedule is obliterated with local inserts. I'd be interested to see the non-preempted national feed on a satellite channel. That would kill off TVLand once and for all.


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## AntAltMike (Nov 21, 2004)

TV Land was cool when it showed Mannix reruns.


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## Dude111 (Aug 6, 2010)

Drucifer said:


> Haven't watch anything on TVland in years. They dropped airing old mystery dramas so I dropped 'em.


Ya they have really become a dissapointment!


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## Paul Secic (Dec 16, 2003)

AntAltMike said:


> TV Land was cool when it showed Mannix reruns.


I think Mannix is on HULU.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

SayWhat? said:


> ...The other problem with MeTV and AntennaTV being on OTA subchannels is that too much of their schedule is obliterated with local inserts. I'd be interested to see the non-preempted national feed on a satellite channel. That would kill off TVLand once and for all.


It is unlikely that local stations do inserts in subchannels. Not that this isn't possible, just not very probable. There is way too much cost for infrastructure and operational maintenance for minor revenue streams such as that for the station to add insert capabiliity, so most of them are filled with spots at the network level only, and then the network pays the station for carriage. It becomes increasingly unlikely the smaller the market is.

TV stations do not really even carry subchannels because they are revenue streams for them; they mostly aren't. They carry them to fill the bandwidth as a placeholder, because if the government discovers that you are not using all of your bandwidth, they will simply yank it away and sell it to someone else, under their "use it or lose it" policy. Besides, giving folks something else to watch cannibalizes their own main programming, so there is not a great motivation for them to altruistically expand your viewing options for free. About the only reason they are there at all is to solidify the hold on the station's bandwidth allocation.

It is also not that likely that subchannel nets would appear on sat or cable as free-standing networks, and even if they did there would be the same amount of commercials, because it would be the same feed and would have to make room for commercials even if that time wasn't sold, so it would be filled with PSAs and promos. This also applies to just subchannels OTA; if the station inserts or doesn't insert, the feed is still structured to have exactly the same ratio of commercial time to program time per hour, so whether the station inserts commercials is not going to change that; whatever they insert just covers non-program time anyway.

One of the tenets of fronting yourself as a subchannel network and getting carriage on a subchannel on an _ad hoc _basis market by market is that you can provide exclusivity to a niche audience, and if the same feed appears on cable, that exclusivity is gone. It might even violate a lot of current contracts.

It is the same philosophy behind why Howard Stern is exclusive to SiriusXM, and also why he makes 100 mil a year and why they went from 400K subs to well over 20 million subs; if he distributed his content in ancillary areas, it dilutes the product and fewer will pay the 14 bucks a month.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

TomCat said:


> It is unlikely that local stations do inserts in subchannels. Not that this isn't possible, just not very probable. There is way too much cost for infrastructure and operational maintenance for minor revenue streams such as that for the station to add insert capabiliity, so most of them are filled with spots at the network level only, and then the network pays the station for carriage. It becomes increasingly unlikely the smaller the market is..


Mine do. They cut in daytime talk shows, local news, high school sports and a few other things. One does a split network with MeTV during part of the day and overnight and CW in the evenings. I get abut half of the MeTV schedule and a little more of the Antenna schedule.

Yeah, I know this thread is about Betty/Kirstie Land, but there isn't much to talk about there.


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