TV viewing to be plagued by a rising tide of snipes and bugs
Commercials are increasingly impinging upon the programming.
(Credit: Sports Media Inc.)Monday's New York Times highlights one of my growing pet peeves: increasingly invasive on-screen ads and information that are invading all manner of TV programs. The article ("As the Fall Season Arrives, TV Screens Get More Cluttered") explores some of the supposed reasons behind the trend, which runs the gamut from "bugs" (channel logos) and on-screen data dumps (news and financial market tickers, scoreboards), to--in my opinion, the top annoyance--"snipes" (animated ads, for either upcoming programs or sponsored products).
On news, financial, and sports programming, I'm a lot more forgiving of the screen clutter, especially when it's informational rather than ad-oriented. But it's those snipes that really get to me. TNT and USA are prime offenders, but the mainstream broadcast networks seem to be trying their hardest to lower themselves to those basic cable depths. The remote control has made flipping channels during commercial breaks a TV pastime since the dawn of the medium, but the rise of the DVR (strangely unmentioned in the Times' coverage) has exacerbated the problem even more: As more and more viewers record their favorite shows, a larger percentage of commercials are falling victim to the fast-forward button. And the networks know that you're pretty much stuck watching ads for The Bionic Woman, DirecTV, or Sunday's NASCAR race if they're taking up the bottom third of the screen during your favorite show. (The same goes for the increasing amount of flat-out product placement appearing in more TV shows.)
My problem with all of this is the declining value proposition of my pay TV service. If all these channels were free, being used as a sponge for advertising would be a pretty fair trade-off. But I'm paying $120 a month for this. Compare that to Netflix--less than $20 a month for access to tens of thousands of uncut movies and TV shows, and the worst you have to endure is a few of those (mostly skippable) pre-movie trailers and FBI warnings.
The other big annoyance with on-screen bugs and snipes is that they seem completely redundant in the age of digital TV. I don't need a big "NBC-HD" in the corner of the screen, or a "You're watching 30 Rock--next up: The Office." If I was dumb enough not to know that--any of it--I need only click the remote's INFO button (channel and program data), or the GUIDE key (what's on any channel now, or for the next week). That's true for anyone who has digital cable, satellite TV, or even most over-the-air HD programming.
Of course, I'm tilting at digital windmills here. The genie's out of the bottle, and anyone who watches TV is just gonna have to live with its transformation to one big advertorium. Just don't expect me to stop complaining about it anytime soon.
John P. Falcone covers home theater and network entertainment products. He's been writing for CNET since 2002. 
It's particularly annoying when I'm watching a show that was hyped to death by these ads, only to see the show itself splattered with additional ads. It's even more irritating to see clutter ads that conflict with the genre of the content at hand. Why, for instance, are NASCAR pit crews working on race cars at the bottom of a drama?
Another problem that garners very little attention is the destruction of end credits. Too often, I see the end credits treated as refuse to discard or whiz through. They're even more often squeezed into a tiny corner of the screen and rendered unreadable, even on our 50 inch widescreen HDTV, while blurbs about upcoming shows supplant the end music. Aside from making it hard to see if that was indeed Christopher Walken walking by and waving in the background, it also on a more fundamental level seems a blatent violation of the rights of the artist, at least on par with all this talk about what pirates and thieves we the end-viewers must seem to be.
And, I agree, too, that this would be petty kavetching if content were delivered to us for free, but we're paying a cable bill.
Some shows I've already opted to follow via iTunes season passes. It's nice, after being subjected to substantial clutter, editing, screen cropping, and end-credit blathering to be able after a decade or so of gradual encroachment to be reminded what it's like to see a TV show as its producers, directors, editors, and the like intended.
There have been times when the local TV weather forecasters have actually asked for the offending clutter to be removed so they could point out a weather feature.
I sometimes wonder if the "powers that be" actually view what the ordinary consumer sees.
advertising? Don't these really annoying snipes violate those rules?
My local news occasionally shows video footage that is hidden behind their on-screen news logo. That makes me laugh, unless it's a video clip I want to see.
My local stations really bug me in winter when there are school closings. They have a running on-screen list of school closings.
This could be done just at the bottom of the screen, but no- they shrink the program to a tiny box in the center- less than 50% of the size it should be. The school closings run across the bottom, and ads run on the other 3 sides.
It drives me nuts. If I have taped something on the vcr that is like that I don't even bother watching it.
The other posters point about subtitles being covered up is a good one. That is a major annoyance to me as well.
Stations also have a habit of squashing the picture so they can run animated ads across the bottom of the screen. Everyone looks like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
And don't even get me started on the programming... there isn't much besides garbage reality shows any more...
There ought to be a law...
Along this same line of reasoning, I view weather alerts as being important, especially if there are tornadoes or other life threatening conditions in the area. But do they have to start the crawler with a raucous noise? We'll see it just fine without the buzz, bell, gong, chime or whatever.
I pay the same as anyone else for cable service and am very annoyed at having to pay plus have these stupid ads interrupt the programmes. Maybe someone at the network might realize that all these ads are driving people away from their shows. I make it a point to write each company who advertizes this way and to tell them that I will not be buying their products until they change their ways.
Soon, if not now, the reason for buying a new TV will be sorely deminished. Ham Radio will come back if this persists!!!
Bob
If there isn't a law against this, maybe we should get one passed.
BTW, How do you get to pay $120 month? On DirecTV I have everything I want for about $80, and sometimes I wonder if that isn't too much.
I keep in mind that I pay $132.00 a year for HBO. Yeah, they provide several hours of original programming a week, some excellent and some quirky, plus a new movie worth watching a couple of times a month. But, all those HBO channels repeat the programming and movies. I'm not sure I'd be happy paying another $132 a year for a NBC Universal package including NBC, USA, SciFi, CNBC, etc. that included far less original programming, old movies instead of a morning show and news, all to avoid product placement.
But the bugs and snipes on the bottom of the screen to advertise the network name and upcoming programming is awful. And if I were dependent upon seeing closed captioning I'd be exploring an FCC complaint or a class action suit.
Unfortunately, TV corporations are not adapting well, or at least not rapidly enough. Their web presence is still weaker than it should be. Obviously, behemoths like CBS Viacom (CBS, Showtime, MTV, Noggin, etc.), NBC Universal owned by GE, Rupert Murdoch (Fox, Fx, etc.), and Disney (ABC, Disney Channel, A&E, Lifetime, etc.) aren't going broke. I'm hoping the morons, at NBC for instance, who embraced snipes and bugs, will be transferred to GE's nuclear energy division.... No, wait guys, I'll watch the snipes and bugs if you keep them away from nuclear products and the jet engines powering my next flight!
Comedian Lewis Black railed on this very topic during the recent Emmy's broadcast. He went off on it. He also railed about how they're squishing the final scene with squished credits so you see neither very well at all. Now sometimes you actually want to see the credits to identify guest stars or who the director/writers were. But you can't because they've jammed another 30-secs of ads into the show's time and that's IN ADDITION to the annoying pop-ups !
There's really nothing we can do other than complain to people who don't care. However, if those pop-ups were delivered on a different video stream then they might be vulnerable to filtering technology, hmmm ....
There's a reason that none of that crap appears on the screeners sent to critics and Emmy voters: because it detracts from the work.
Since we now can blow off the commercials, they are frantic because their financial base has been eroded.
Running a 24-7 TV plant costs thousands of dollars a month in electricity alone so lost revenue is not tolerated.
So, as a result, you get all of the graphical non-sense on the screen.
They have to advertise while you ARE watching.
Personally, I like what sports networks do:
They simply insert virtual ads seamlessly superimposed on the field. And, of course, the athletes wear or drive/ride product placements.
Get used to it.
It's business and business is dying.
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Do yourselves a favor:
Don't watch TV. Rent or buy the show on DVD. The right people still get their money and you get the show and nothing else.
Buy a combo-Bluray/HD-DVD player so you can watch all of these shows that are shot in HD as they become available.
- by normancom December 1, 2008 7:13 PM PST
- I was glad to see a thread on the issue of these annoying "snipes".
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (22 Comments)Can anyone give me info. on how to contact the right "powers" in the cable and broadcast companies? If you have had success, I'd like to emulate it.
Perhaps a Blog-site should be built that would get their attention! It is getting ridiculous now.