I'm sure there's research somewhere that will show me as a typical viewer. We click to see what's on the other channels as soon as there's an ad break. And the chances of us forgetting to click back to our original increases if we do find something interesting on another channel. Therefore while a TV station makes money on advertising they also lose viewership the more ads they carry.

Surely it would make sense then to minimise viewers channel-hopping propensities by not carrying unneccessary ad breaks? I'm talking about interruptions to a show to tell us how great the channel is that we're watching, or what we could see on that channel at some other time of day. These self-promos seem to repeat endlessly and I'm sure, at the cost of viewers. The SABC channels even seem to synchronise their ad breaks, which appear every five minutes, which is almost guaranteed to have us hopping on to etv, M-Net or DStv.

Thank goodness MNet still shows uninterrupted movies...

[17 May 2005 15:28]

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