Sunday Night, Channel 7 broadcasted a brand new TV show, imaginatively titled “Sunday Night“. Apparently it promised to be “breaking the stories that matter and delivering moments you’ll never forget“.

The great thing about Channel 7 is that they never fail to live up to their promises. It certainly is one show I’ll never forget. There was this one story about a man capturing dangerous crocodiles. The look of fake horror on the reporters face…the reporter “paralysed” with fear, unable to leave the boat… I will never forget that.

But you know, what I’ll never forget most of all are the new watermarks.

Yes, not content with one watermark, Channel 7 felt the need to have a second, and to move both of them in to the 4:3 space to make sure you didn’t miss them. Oh, and yes, it was the same on 7 HD – because there are so many people out there with 4:3 sets watching 7 HD.

Actually, is anyone watching 7 HD? During the Australian Open it wasn’t even worth watching the tennis on 7 HD because Channel 7 without warning switched to other shows at 9:30 each night in the middle of a game.

I can’t believe I have shares in Channel 7. What was I thinking?

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.

I’ve mentioned before how insulting it is for the TV stations to deface TV programmes – either with annoying popups or watermarks. I had thought they’d gone as far as they possibly could with this lack of respect, until I noticed the end credits of Channel TEN’s police drama “Rush”.

Read the credits carefully. Well, what they are passing off as credits. Who created the show? Who stars in the show?

Yes, you need to go to the website to find the credits. Now having the credits online is great – and TEN to their credit have them all online as easy to read PDFs, though I had to do a search on the site for “Rush credits” to find them. But are TEN going to maintain the PDFs forever?

I applaud TEN for putting the credits online. But why take them off the show itself? So you can fit in an extra minute of advertising?

Are other shows starting to do this? Is this happening overseas as well?

Because otherwise I would miss out on the wonderful HD programming we get in Australia.

Tonight Ten HD gave us The Gladiator. In glorious widescreen high definition. Here’s a sample.

Thanks Ten. At least the commercials were widescreen.