What the hell is up with TV now?
by aurahack
It's been about two and a half years, and counting, that I haven't gotten cable on my TV. I almost did a year back when I got my 42" TV, as I was thinking of upgrading my digital service to some nice HD channels. I didn't and have yet to really find the incentive to do so, which is weird considering I watch a lot of TV shows. I keep up to shows like House, Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, Louie, 30...
It's been about two and a half years, and counting, that I haven't gotten cable on my TV. I almost did a year back when I got my 42" TV, as I was thinking of upgrading my digital service to some nice HD channels. I didn't and have yet to really find the incentive to do so, which is weird considering I watch a lot of TV shows. I keep up to shows like House, Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, Louie, 30 Rock and Futurama all through the power of torrenting, anyways. So everytime I go to my girlfriend's house, it's a fun experience of watching regular-ass cable on a regular-ass TV. Watching Teletoon (Canada's equivalent to the US' Cartoon Network) is fun, 'cause I get to watch re-runs of King of the Hill and all that junk. ... I should probably get to my point.
I was watching the network's usual run of Futurama, King of the Hill, American Dad and Robot Chicken. During the shows, though, I noticed (hard not to) ads that started playing in the middle of the show. No joke. I wish I had a YouTube video to show how abusively intrusive it is.
The show will continue playing and shrink to about 75% size onto the left of the screen and the top, right and bottom of the screen becomes ad space that, in the case of last night, was ads for The Other Guys and Kick-Ass. Now, they are just static-animation ads, so it wasn't movie/audio over a show, but holy shit. The only form of advertising that's worse than that is those fucking flash ads that appear over the article you're trying to read on like, IGN or something. This'll last about 10 seconds before going back to it's original state. And that's not all! Ads for the same things would also flash during the show only for a split-second, basically resembling subliminal messaging. The worst, by far, however is literally stopping the show to advertise some more. Once again, to promote Kick-Ass, the show would literally be cut by a fake, Teletoon-made newscast saying "Breaking news! A superhero has been spotted!" and would go on to play a 5 second ad for Kick-Ass, plug it's Blu-Ray release date and resume the show where it left off.
I only watch Teletoon and Discovery when I'm at my girlfriend's house so I have no fucking clue is happens on any other network, but has TV become so desperate for revenue that it's doing this now? Ultimately I don't really care because I don't watch TV to begin with but what causes them to even try this form of advertising in the first place?