A week or so ago I was recording Tin Man on Channel 7 here in Australia. I have no idea if the show is any good – I haven’t watched it yet.  But I love a good “re-imagining”.

Anyway, I recorded both episodes on my Mac using EyeTV, as I tend to do with most shows these days. Once recorded, I then edit TV shows to remove commercials (take that Australian TiVo). Here’s the EyeTV timeline showing where the ads are (the blue/grey areas) in episode 2:

That seems to me to be an awful lot of ads in one TV show (or in this case, part 2 of a TV show).

So, I did some calculations:

• The show’s total length was 2 hours 47 minutes
• There were 12 ad breaks
• Removing ads the show went for 2 hours 6 minutes
• The commercials shown went for a total of 41 minutes

That’s right – a show that went for 2 hours 6 minutes had 41 minutes of commercials – 1/4 of the entire show was advertising, or to put it another way, they added commercials making up 1/3 of the total running time of the actual movie. And that doesn’t include:

• Popup advertising showing the next TV show:

• Lotto results:

• The incredibly insulting squashing of credits to advertise other shows at the end of the show:

It really is no wonder that people are turning away from Free-to-air television. The commercial stations need to find a new source of revenue – more and more people are not going to put up with this crap. Which of the Australian networks is most likely to be first to realise this? Seven doesn’t look like a candidate.