Unreal. We were watching a movie on tv tonight - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets if you must know - and I noticed that the commercials seemed to be coming thick and fast - so fast that I didn't really have time to get settled down from the last set of ads before another lot came along. At first I thought maybe it would drop off as we got further into the movie, but it didn't. After a while I decided to grab a pen and note down how long it was between ads and how long the ad breaks lasted (hey, I had to do something to fill in all these breaks). The results were shocking. I started timing at 9:30pm through to the end of the movie at 11pm. Here's how it panned out:

9:32 to 9:37 ads - length: 5mins
9:37 to 9:47 movie - length: 10mins
9:47 to 9:52 ads - length: 5mins
9:52 to 10:04 movie - length: 12mins
10:04 to 10:09 ads - length: 5mins
10:09 to 10:17 movie - length: 8mins
10:17 to 10:22 ads - length: 5mins
10:22 to 10:36 movie - length: 14mins
10:36 to 10:41 ads - length: 5mins
10:41 to 10:55 movie - length: 14mins
10:55 to 11:00 ads - length: 5mins

How bad is that? That's a whole half hour worth of ads for less than one hour worth of movie! What pisses me off even more is that we pay every month for this appalling service (cable tv subscription). If they really have to have that much ad saturation, at least play the movie for half an hour and then have a quarter hour ad break so viewers can try to enjoy the movie without the near-constant interruptions!

The channel in question that ruined this movie was the ABC Family Channel - gee thanks guys. Maybe the ABC Family Channel should do some market research into their target audience - I'm sure all the parents out there really appreciate trying to get their kids to quiet down and watch the movie only to be hit with ad breaks every 10 minutes to get them unsettled again. Idiots. The sad thing is, many (if not most) channels aren't much better. If they tried pulling this kind of crap at movie theatres, patrons would be demanding their money back, yet it's ok to do it on television? There should at least be a reasonable limit on this kind of thing.

Oh, before someone mentions it, yes, there is pay-per-view cable tv, which I believe gives ad-free movies, but hey, we're already paying for cable, why should we have to pay more to watch what we're already paying for?