Fresh Squeezed Greed - Television Goes To Hell (or deeper, at least).

Man, it’s tough to be a TV station affiliate nowadays. Sure, the big nets have convinced Hollywood that a half-hour program should be no more than 22 minutes long, which leaves eight glorious minutes of time to fill with happy fun $$ commercials, but then they go and burn up most of that time with six minutes of pesky and wasteful national spots.

So what’s a local broadcaster with a control room full of used car and lawyer commercials to do when he only has two minutes to use every half hour? Why, defy the rules of television time and space, of course! The evil Time Machine is back. (continue for more)

Prime Image’s Time Machine is typically set to chop 900 frames out of a half hour of broadcast feed, which creates space for one more commercial to be squeezed in. And knowing the nature of human greed, it is highly likely that some are trying to set it to do even more damage. Perhaps even compressing the commercials. And all this is done behind closed doors without the network or public knowing about it or consenting to it. That is, until they’re caught.

Nashville’s WSMV is the latest in a growing number of stations that have been exposed using this device in order to pump up their profit (easily hundreds of thousands of bucks a year). But this time, advertising agency Rubin Postaer and Associates is fighting back.

This scam pisses me off. The huge number of spots already squeezed into programming has already created a mass of visual clutter that miffs the typical viewer and reduces the impact and effectiveness of our best commercials (and makes the bland ones even less effective than they are by their own nature). The simple fact that cable nets like TV Land have to chop an average of two minutes out of classic shows from the 60s and 70s so that they can get in today’s required number of commercials is very telling. It's gone too far.

One solution seems easy at first. Air less commercials per program and raise the placement costs accordingly. With less clutter and therefore happier viewers and advertisers (and more time for the actual program), this would be a nice move. But of course, if rivals didn’t follow suit and kept squishing in today’s number of spots, their prices would be lower and more attractive to buyers who prefer cost over quality.

I dunno. Anyone out there have another answer before it gets even worse?