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45 Min TV Shows
ie NCIS (60min -15)x 20,000,000 weekly viewers= 5,000,000 hours | |
What if every film had to be either 90 or 180 mins. The inflexible half hour or full hour broadcast TV show formats don't work for every program. But with 45 min episodes, some of your favorite shows could make you laugh for an extra 11 mins per week. And other shows you don't want to commit an hour
to might be worth watching at 45 mins.
[link]
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Most hour shows are 45 minutes, plus 15 for commercials. (check the play-length on DVD). The half hour you'd have left for actual content with this wouldn't allow a very complex plot. |
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"Commit"? To a television show? The world is wide, and much of it quite interesting. Even some of the people, though not as good-looking as actors, are quite pleasant, and/or full of plot twists. I'm not going to fishbone this idea, because if you got dis-heartened you might just slump further down the couch, but it's a close call. |
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45 mins refers to the scheduled not actual length. |
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So the idea is to standardise TV and film run-times? Or more accurately, to change the already defined standards? |
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Sorry, but is this really a new invention? I bet there are some TV programmes out there with a running/scheduling time of 45 minutes - and if there's not, then with clever redistribution of adverts, I bet you could easily engineer one. |
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Which sets up a question. If the TV company uses programming as bait to intice people to watch adverts, then presumably, there must be an optimal programme to advert ratio. Too long - and you don't squeeze the most money out of your investment, too short - and you start losing viewers as they succumb to advert saturation and opportunistic flippage. I wonder how the TV Scientists determine that optimal ratio - presumably there is an attention-boredom bell-curve for different viewing populations - and making sure you cater for at least one standard deviation would ensure you don't loose too many viewers - but that would be based on the programme to advert ratios of other TV channels available - this would be fine if all the channels were operated by independent companies - the competition would ensure a tight maintenance of the "market-price" in terms of which ratios the population will stand - but, if lots of the channels are operated by big media groups, and are able to form a cartel, "fixing" the ratio at a higher level than the public might otherwise accept, you end up with a lot more advertising for the same amount of programming. I don't know how the channels break down in terms of control, but presumably there's some degree of cross-company control. It would be interesting to see what effect this has in different countries. |
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I suspect that it's the same psychology as that employed in premium telephone 'helplines'. The companies have information about how long the average person is willing to stay on hold. |
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I'm not sure I understand where the extra 11 minutes is coming from... |
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Yeah, I figure 10-11 more minutes of actual show time if a half hour show changed format. |
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When American programmes are shown on the BBC,
because we have no commercial breaks, they're
usually forty-five or something like twenty-two
minutes long. I also get the impression that the way
commercial breaks work on commercial channels in
the UK differs too, but i don't know how. Do you not
have more but shorter ones over in the States?
What's it like in Canada and Australasia? |
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American TV advertising is a *nightmare* (from my UKian point of view). The ad breaks are relentless and timed right on that threshold of annoyance. |
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[miggavin] That was my point, with only about 30 minutes of actual program Dramas are going to have a very hard time getting across a complex plot. |
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Advertisements are much like herpes simplex. Once they're there, they stay. You can pay all you want (buy cable, satellite, etc.) but advertisements just keep coming back. Damn viral marketing. |
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I refuse to watch TV with commercials, so we pay extra for *movie channels*. After watching 6 - 30 second adverts, I have forgotten what the heck I was watching! Even movie channels advertise the next movie in the time you are waiting for the next one to begin... |
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