Time Warner cable loads every cable channel (other than the ‘premiums’) here with commercial breaks. I thought half the point of cable was that there would be less interruptions. But the bad thing is the commercial breaks consist largely of the same commericals, for Time Warner services (Road Runner, In Demand, etc.) over and over and over. And the breaks are very long.
I counted once, and five channels were showing the “In Demand” commercial with the man and the flowers (he comes home and pauses “Six Feet Under” to sniff a rose) at the same time. And then after that commercial ended there was the same lame Road Runner commercial (the cartoon where the guy takes his date to a wrestling match) and then the flower sniffer was back again in the same break!
Plus 75% of the channels are crap. I’ve heard other cable services have more variety - but we are stuck with whatever our viewing area has - right?
Don’t get Time Warner (ours is Comcast) but had to read your post to be sure you had an exclusive bitch. You don’t! Comcast does the same thing. Lots of Comcast promos, but even worse are the local ads that get so boring and which are repeated well past the staleness date.
The only safe places here are the premium channels (we’re down to just HBO – mostly for The Sopranos) and the Flix and Sundance ones which are part of our “basic.” Turner Classic Movies is still commercial free, and I guess you can toss in C-SPAN (although I rarely watch them unless major congressional news is happening). For all I know, Comcast is invading their turf as well.
You’d think that by paying a hefty fee for cable that you’d be subsidizing them and could be spared the grief of 5-8 minute commercial breaks every 3-5 minutes. I have to LOVE the movie or program before I will even consider something on the other channels.
And the wasted space on religious channels irks me. They have to do it, I hear, if the channel could be picked up on antenna. But we must have 6-10 of them hogging space. And we can’t even bypass them with the “Favorites” options.
So, you’re not alone, syncrolecyne, if that’s any consolation.
Not just that, but I’ve got two channels that are nothing but Time Warner commercials. One offers instructions about digital cable features, which is useless because it’s down on the analog channels. The other is called “The Buzz,” and it’s nothing but the commercials described by the OP. There’s also two channels with pay-per-view previews.
As for the religious stations, I wonder why cable systems don’t put them on a separate tier that is like the pay foreign language stations. Seems like the only folks that watch them are fundies, and that they would certainly pay to watch GTV, INSP (a Christian version of MTV), TBN, CBN, Word, Daystar, Angel TV, Word, MBC, and EWTN (all the ones I get now); otherwise, most folks won’t miss it.
I have five home shopping networks, too. What’s the point? Do cable systems get a cut of the revenue from shopping channel sales?
The cable networks offer a certain amount of time per hour to the “local” channels, ie, your Time Warner, Adelphia, etc, to run local commercials. So you can be watching Trading Spaces on TLC and see a local spot for your car dealership down the street, while your mom across the country watching the same show can see a spot for a nearby pizza shop.
Since the networks have no control over what is shown in the local breaks, it is conceivable to see a Buick spot followed immediately by another Buick spot, if the Buick spot is sold locally.
I’m on Dish, so I can’t speak specifically to Time Warner and Comcast. But I think that’s what may be happening…the local cable outlets aren’t inserting their local breaks correctly.
Here the foreign language channels (mostly Spanish) are not tiered, so someone is stuck with 7 or 8 of these channels here - like it or not (interestingly there are broadcast channels in Spanish here that are not carried on cable so Spanish speakers get ripped off a bit too). Likewise there are 3 or 4 religious channels, and 3 or 4 home shopping channels. My mom complains about all the sports channels as well. I wish they would tier them here too.