

Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials - prakash
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/health/03mind.html

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ewiethoff
Liked the show? Maybe it was the _old_ commercials. The "Taxi" and "Happy
Days" research appears to fail to distinguish between a program being
interrupted by today's commercials versus yesteryear's commercials. Many
people delight in old ads, whether they be newspaper ads, magazine ads, movie
posters, or whatnot, because they're history. They show us the changes in
design esthetics, cultural values & propaganda, fashion, and so on. (I happen
to be keen on fonts and women's eyebrow styles.) That's why such things have
value as collectibles. I can't help picturing the research subjects smirking
at the "bad" ties worn by the Michael Brownstein lawyers.

Liked the show? Maybe it was the pacing of the program for commercial
interruption. TV ads are not injected at random intervals. They're injected
between scenes. But not just any scenes. They're injected after scenes which
were written to be followed by a commercial break. In other words, the TV show
was designed to be enjoyed with the breaks. For example, contrast made-for-TV
movies (designed for breaks) with made-for-theater movies (designed for
continuous viewing). Watch an adless video of a made-for-TV movie, and you can
see the story build to a little climax every few minutes, and more frequent
climaxes as the story progresses. The ever-increasing climaxes get so
tiresome, in my taste, that they cry out for interruption.

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cmars232
I can honestly say this is not the case in my experience. When we visit
someone who has cable, its a shock similar to the one I feel when I install a
new Firefox that doesn't have NoScript yet. There's all these interruptions,
lame cliffhangers, and sometimes you can't even rewind it if you missed
something. WTF?

One strange habit I've noticed as a result of no commercials is an increasing
impatience for the interesting bits of the content. We've gotten into the
habit of FFwd through the slow bits of shows though. There's a surprising
amount of non-content in what gets sold as the actual content of movies, TV
shows, etc.

I'd pay for legitimate TV if I could FF everything and get all the shows I
like on demand when they actually air. Life's just too short to sit through 30
minutes of maybe-interesting content, 5 minutes of total filler, and 25
minutes of commercials and interruptions. The industry needs to start
respecting the viewers' time.

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Tichy
Could just be cognitive dissonance: the more we pay for something, the better
we have to think it is, so that we don't feel stupid. Watching commercials is
like paying for watching a TV show, so we have to deceive ourselves into
liking it more ("it was worth the commercials"). Since in the experiment the
researcher only asked for individual estimates of happyness, it seems to me
cognitive dissonance could explain it.

For the TV show - the massage example sounds more interesting, but not enough
details about the setup are given (ie what kind of interruptions).

