Oh, and it’s not just cable stations that do this. Fox does it regularly.
The other night they did one for King of the Hill. It has Hank Hill riding his lawn mower all the way across the screen, and making a noise. O.K., I get it - King of the Hill - yeah. It was almost clever. He’s riding his mower, just like on the show. Cute. But THEN, they had to do it 2 more times. And not just 3 times in a row really quick, but once, then a pause so you think it’s over, then again all of a sudden so you go “what the hell?”, then another pause, so you really think it’s over, then a THIRD time, so you have an an aneurism. It’s like they aren’t satisfied with just getting you to look at their ad; they won’t stop until you are thoroughly annoyed.
I love the Simpsons opening where before hopping on the couch, Homer rips the FOX logo from the bottom right of the screen ond everybody stomps the hell out of it. 
There was an episode of South Park with subtitles in one scene, and the Comedy Central logo purposely obsured the end of a dirty word.
FOX again: during tonight’s Yankees-Sox game, a bug popped up that basically took out the entire lower left-hand corner of the screen for… I don’t know, maybe half a minute. There were fireworks noises and the usual crap from what I’ve dubbed FOX’s Useless Graphics Department. The pyrotecnics advised me that there was another baseball game tomorrow. I’m glad they realized there was no other way to inform me of this fact.
The plus side was that right as this display began, one of the announcers used the word serious. So I hear “serious,” followed by fireworks and this enormous, glitzy bug. The justification got me laughing pretty hard, thus saving the TV from a hurled remote.
I live in the UK and have no idea what you guys are talking about.
Though from what I can gather this sounds like an appalling way to advertise. Thank god for the BBC.
There was a recent thread in GD about public-funded broadcasting - here .
I think “bugs” pretty much clinch the argument in favour of it.
That may work for the little bitty bugs, but you’re going to miss a lot of the show’s action if you cover the entire bottom third of the TV screen. These things are HUGE. And noisy. Are we supposed to mute the TV so we can’t hear them, either?