The Proletariat Congress

The CRTC has decided that they don’t need to keep a cap on the number of minutes cable networks are allowed to devout to commercials. The current cap is levied at 12 minutes, an insult to the average Canadian viewer who pays for the privilege of having cable television delivered to the home. The time cap should be significantly less; we do not need to be needless bombarded with more television advertising. It’ll drive the consumer base away from television and other media outlets that bombard us with mindless ads that scream at us about meaningless products we either already have or don’t need.

As it currently stands, 12 minutes of each hour are spend dedicated to commercials. Never mind the fact that opening and closing credits take another two or three minutes each, plus any warnings that may be aired upon returning the programme, leaving very little room for actual programming. This means that in the span of a one hour show, the viewer is subject to 12 minutes of ads, a good two minutes or so for opening credits, another two or so for closing credits, plus time delays between returning to the show because of warnings or tv station logos.

So… 60 min(time slot) -12 min(commercials) -5 min(credits) -(30sx4) (warnings) = ~41 minutes of show time, excluding the blank space inserted, plus the chance of blackouts et cetera. So, from this, we lose at least 20 minutes of actually programming because of time devoted to ads, credits and any warnings plus blank space, plus any space dedicated to “programme sponsors”. Yet the CRTC thinks it justifiable to ease the restrictions to allow for up to 15 minutes of commercials?

They want to Americanise Canadian television more by allowing broadcasters to spend about as much time on commercials as Americans currently do, which is anywhere from 14-16 minutes? Do we really need to be bombarded with more commercials? There is more than enough advertising already in this world without having to deal with another 3 minutes of commercials per every tv viewing hour.

Ads are pervading every element of our society; they are littered on the streets, our newspapers, magazines, bus stops, the internet, movie theatres.

And groups anti-piracy groups wonder why people would rather download stuff for free. If we actually got substantial programming on TV that wasn’t littered with endless ads maybe people would want to pay for the cable package or want to go to the movies but when we have to pay to watch ads, we’d rather pirate it because it’s cheaper and at least we know we wouldn’t be forced to ads.

TV ad limits lifted

Stumble It!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under canada, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.