(no subject)

[tamakun]

Woah! -- Since when did commercial breaks no longer have that half-second of black in-between each spot?

I had noticed probably 6-10 years ago that Japan's TV commercials were so fast-paced and crammed together that there was hardly time to breathe, and I silently predicted that it would occur here sometime. Now I've noticed that television these days doesn't have any blacks inbetween commercials, and I have no idea when this happened.

Something I have to wonder about - considering how crushed together these commercials are when they go to break, I have to wonder if the television station can theoretically charge more for the first or last commercial in the block, since I believe that the first and last commercials stick more in memory than the rest (mainly because we've partially tuned-out at that point).

In computer-related news, I just found that apparently Vista's SP1 doesn't trust Dual-Boots (which I would hazard a guess that the official reason is due to Boot Viruses and BitLocker encrypted drives, but has inadvertently affected Linux Dual-Boots). Not that anyone running Linux would be running Vista...

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"inadvertantly"

You think Microsoft wouldn't take any opportunity they can to chip away at Linux's usefulness?

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

And actually, I hadn't noticed the loss of the black space for commercials! Dang...

I'm willing to chalk that up to one of two things.... either new digital signals means it doesn't need to rely on noticing black space to know where to splice commercials (or maybe it was done by hand previously?)... or, advertisers specifically asked for it to be removed, as an attempt to baffle primitive DVRs from skipping the commercials.

Man, today is the day of corporate interests, isn't it. :P

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I never thought about the DVR idea - I always thought that advertisers were just trying to squeeze out as many milliseconds as they could out of their advertising dollar. I kinda had this post thought up when I realized that the announcer of a car commercial was talking pretty fast, like, Micro-Machines fast, in order to get everything squeezed in.

I think your theory holds up, though - most PVRs now don't have the auto-skip ability (and I have reason to believe there was some fairness law passed about it or something, courtesy of the advertisers), and Bell's PVRs just have a "skip forward 30 second" button.

[scruloose.livejournal.com]

If you believe that the effect on dual-boot Linux systems is inadvertent, you just haven't been paying attention. Since about 1993.