I know the number of minutes of ads is increasing, but at one time ads also had to be a certain minimum length, legally, to cut down on the number during any break.
Are there any rules left at all?
Yes
I don’t think there ever were rules,its up to the broadcasting station. However,most commercials are either 15 or 45 seconds long. Tv companies do this to get enough time to get a point across and they will get a lot of money.
Actually, there are specific ad laws for children’s programming. The number/length of commercials, content, and relative affiliation with the show. Kid’s have only so much mush for intelligence, and they too easliy trust and believe TV ads, or so the argument goes…
We all know that no adults have trouble distinguishing between fact and bullshit.
i think ads are either 15 or 30 seconds long, and there are 6 minutes of ads for every half hour program.
commercials run about 2 to 2-1/2 minutes and are shown every 7 minutes or so. They do seem to be getting longer. I could go for a short jog and come back just as a show starts back up.
There is one, if there is an NBA game, and a team asks for and is granted a twenty-second timeout, then NBC must fill in a 30-second commercial at that time.
In the United States, there are almost no government-enforced limits on the number of commericals during a broadcast day, although the networks and local stations may have their own limits.
Through the 1980s, broadcast stations were seen as public trustees, with obligations to the communities they “served”, and the Federal Communications Commission kept a watch on the amount of commercials individual stations had. Also, the National Association of Broadcasters had a voluntary code, which most of the major stations followed, that limited the number of commercials per hour for radio and TV stations. However, the Federal Trade Commission complained this code was a restraint of trade, which artificially limited the available commerical time, and it was dropped.
Around this same time, the FCC started eliminating most of its the programing requirements. So, except for a few areas like the ban on tobacco ads, and children’s TV limits, there are few federal limits or requirements any longer in force.
We talked about this before. Right now daytime programs get 22 minutes per hour & nightime 20 minutes per hour. Yuck. Search for ‘commercial’ might still be some info.
Did they drop the other requirements, like having to have a certain amount of news, religion, and kiddie shows to be publicly “responsible”.
On the one hand, I remember recent in-fighting for local TV towers based on “unbalanced” “non-community-servicing” formats. One was all-Christian, and one was a shopping station. The other chains were trying to stop their licences from being renewed, so they could claim the lower channel numbers.
On the other hand, we still have all-Christian, all-shopping, all sports networks. (I suppose they could be “mixed-use” in the middle of the night. I avoid all of these)