This link will take you to one of the original Star Trek episodes.
The curious thing is that the episode, without commercials, is fifty minutes long.
Go up a few decades. TNG and DS9 ran 46 minutes. This episode of Star Trek: Enterprise is 41 minutes long. If you pick up an "on demand" or Hulu episode of almost anything, where they haven't added commercials or promos, they seem to be about 43 minutes long.
I'm not exactly sure when the time began to get crunched. The Rockford Files ran fifty minutes per episode. McGyver and Quantum Leap were just under 48 minutes.
These days, it's just more crap to fast-forward through on the DVR/VCR.
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Wednesday, March 4, 2015
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As the time available ti air commercials increased, the length of commercials actually decreased more or less inversely. In the 1950s and early 1960s, most TV spots were 60 seconds long. By the 1970s, most were 30 seconds long. Now many are 10 seconds long. So you get bombarded by more and more commercials in those nineteen or so minutes of TV spots.
ReplyDeleteNext the media gurus scratch their heads and start to wonder why they're losing audiences. Or why young audiences are attracted to their cell phones.
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The New York Crank.
With TNG and DS9, the producers deliberately made the episodes shorter to entice independent TV stations to carry their syndicated shows. Shorter episodes + more commercials = more ad revenue. Others quickly followed suit.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised at how slowly the time has been eroded.
ReplyDeleteWhat drives me nuts is the lower third ads that run DURING THE SHOW. That trend will likely continue. Lots of extraneous noise and motion from the bottom of the screen, growing upwards, until TV is just an ad for the pay version of the (relatively) unscathed programming that will cost you big bucks.