Bell Mobile Phone

[AugieTN]

 

[mikedt]

Mobile phone 1976, UK, Blue Peter

 

[ocnbrze]

thank god commercials are not this long any more.

 

[puppykickr]

thank god commercials are not this long any more.

Although this may be true, it holds only for the individual commercial.

As far as broadcast tv goes ('regular old television'), the commercials themselves may be shorter, but there are more of them.
That makes the actual commercial breaks longer than they were years ago.

I actually saw this and then went back and timed it.

My research was done with an old VHS tape of a famous daytime tv show, The Oprah Winfrey Show from the 1980's.

The commercials seemed long, but the breaks seemed short.
So I timed the breaks, and they came in at 2½ minutes each.
Then I timed a daytime show (don't remember which one) that was in the same time slot, and the breaks were 4-5 minutes long.

Basically nowadays, you get about 40 minutes of watchable show per hour.

Contrast that with something like Tubi, where the coming breaks are not apparent in the show (none of that old "And when we come back from the next commercial break we blah, and blah blah blah, so stay tuned!" that takes up valuable show time, not to mention that the first minutes back from break are usually spent rehashing what went on before the break), and there are 3-4 or less 15 second commercials.
That really is so much nicer.