I miss commercial break bumpers

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by altaeria, Nov 19, 2021.

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  1. altaeria

    altaeria Forum Resident Thread Starter

    TV shows nowadays really like to ambush us with abrupt cutaways into commercial breaks. Sometimes it seems like they happen mid-sentence. I kinda miss the subtle segue of good-old-fashioned commercial break bumpers.
     
  2. nosticker

    nosticker Forum Guy

    Location:
    Ringwood, NJ
    We will return after these messages.

    Yep, that's just people building a playlist.


    Dan
     
  3. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    Television, or radio?

    They're both plagued with the same problems of automated switching, that may be cheaper, but doesn't always flow as smoothly.

    A couple weeks ago we had the entire Sinclair television chain hacked by outsiders, which screwed up a lot of their programming (not that I care all that much about them as a company, but I do watch some shows on one of their affiliates here). Automated sequencing systems are not as resistant to problems, because there's nobody on duty to correct them.

    Our local NBC affiliate has been having some problems as well: I see the "color-morphing peacock" cycle through for several seconds before whatever commercials or other elements they should have been running, pop back in: that "peacock" thing is supposed to just be seen by the engineers at the local affiliates, to monitor when the network feed comes back in after a local break.

    Even my favorite news channel will let a second-and-a-half of a network spot go by before the locally-scheduled spot that was supposed to cover that break, finally starts, all the time. Live switching engineers would never let this crap happen on a regular basis. And of course, that translates to coming back to the network promo before the next segment, a second late as well.

    Radio? Yeah, unprofessional programmers can let a lot of mistakes go by without paying any attention, especially nighttime or overnight programming, where they really just don't care. Some stations are simply too cheap to make it all sound smooth, because they simply can't spare the brain cells to make their automation work as well as it could.

    It all comes down to using live people with the right amount of seconds of bumpers, promos, liners, and most importantly, a human sense of timing, who care about what they do, and have learned to do it with that finesse of pride in their work.
     
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  4. jimac51

    jimac51 A mythical beast.

    Location:
    Allentown,pa.
    Millesconds that are unnoticed by average viewers. And true TV junkies ain't ordering the Gotham Steel crap anyway,nor going to watch La Brea because of a 10-15 second spot. Now about those Medicare benefits hawked by Joe Namath and Jimmie Walker...
     
  5. bmasters9

    bmasters9 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Fountain Inn, SC
    Are you meaning in the sense of "[name of show] will continue following station identification"?
     
  6. jason88cubs

    jason88cubs Forum Resident

    Location:
    Us
    I remember watching Cubs games on WGN, where they would do a station identification break while getting a beautiful shot of Lake Michigan and "THIS IS WGN, YOUR HOME FOR YOUR CHICAGO CUBS"
     
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  7. normanr

    normanr Forum Resident

    Location:
    London, UK
    I think there are regulations in the UK that mean advertising slots have to be kept separate from programmes, so we always get a brief pause before the commercial break, accompanied by a still from the titles or the show’s logo. But we also have sponsorship bumpers so you get to the end of a scene, little pause with show name on screen, then a short video which has the name of the sponsor but legally may not be a commercial for their products. So for example on the More4 channel we currently get a video showing an ageing hipster heading a football away from his shiny car, with the voiceover giving the tagline “Arnold Clark. We leave the drama to More4” but no mention of who Arnold Clark is or what he does (apparently he sells cars).

    Then we get three minutes of adverts. It means that fast-forward button gets a lot of use.
     
    altaeria likes this.
  8. altaeria

    altaeria Forum Resident Thread Starter

     
  9. Ignatius

    Ignatius Forum Resident

    Half of MeTV's programming is bumpers, the other half is ads for sports betting apps.
     
    Shawn likes this.
  10. nosticker

    nosticker Forum Guy

    Location:
    Ringwood, NJ
    I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that bumpers and even mid-break bumpers probably have gone away in favor of more ad time or promos.



    Dan
     
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  11. A Grain of Sand

    A Grain of Sand Forum Resident

    Location:
    Riverside, CA
    I wouldn’t be surprised if commercial time exceeds program time on some channels in the near future.
     
    Spastica, minglewood and John B Good like this.
  12. Hanglow

    Hanglow Forum Resident

    Location:
    Saratoga New York
    Don't forget those Reverse Mortgage Commercials:rolleyes:...a slew of actors have pitched for this shady concept...Tom Selleck,The Fonz...do these guys really need the money?

    Another annoying one is William Devane and Rosland Capital...scaring the sh#t out of you that the dollar will be worthless in the near future...telling you to invest in gold:tiphat::ignore:
     
  13. Hanglow

    Hanglow Forum Resident

    Location:
    Saratoga New York
    Ha...I cut the cord years ago and gone with Roku but lately it seems the ad demons are on to us Roku users.
    Watching our local tv news affiliate last night there was a total of 8 commercials in one of the breaks...I'm thinking
    the news station is backdooring the way to keep the revenue stream healthy.
     
  14. Scowl

    Scowl Forum Resident

    Location:
    ?
    Remember when Hal Linden would tell us that Barney Miller would return after these messages? Then after the commercials we saw... the credits. Thanks, Hal.
     
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  15. John B Good

    John B Good Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    NS, Canada
    Only 3 minutes? You're lucky.

    After what seems like 5 minutes, we overshoot the end of the interrruption, have to back up, and sometimes miss it again :(
     
  16. nosticker

    nosticker Forum Guy

    Location:
    Ringwood, NJ
    I guess it makes sense. 2x:05 bumpers is a :10 fee spot, 3x:05 bumpers is a :15 national spot. A :05 mid-break bumper can be in the center of a 3:02 break.
    $$$$$$


    Dan
     
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  17. Lenny99

    Lenny99 The truth sets you free.

    Location:
    Clarksburg WV

    I don't remember this, but the from what I've read early radio especially sports broadcasts were bad about running into a commercial without warning. Like, "that hit was too hot to handle. If today's temperature is too hot for u, try a _____ beer to cool down."

    I do remember TV in the 60's. You always knew when it was time for a commercial. They occurred pretty much the same time.

    They also had studio breaks for the local affiliate stations to plug something regional.
     
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  18. bmasters9

    bmasters9 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Fountain Inn, SC
    IIRC, that's how it was when I was a boy as well.
     
    Lenny99 likes this.
  19. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    well they can sell those seconds used by cutaways...it's all about money....the commercials are endless, disgusting, repetitive and down right maddening these day...
     
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  20. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    Don't listen to sports as a rule, but I've run my share of ballgames on radio stations, including football in the past couple of years on our local ESPN affiliate, where they would have cues like that to be ready for an upcoming break.

    Some breaks would be completely network spots, others would sound like network breaks, only the outcue would be different, informing the guy at every local station running the game locally, it was time to play local spots and cover up the ones the network was running...which would usually be spots for the city of the flagship station. We'd have a five-second bumper to play coming out of our break, with sfx that would trail-out, so you could fade the game up underneath, and hear the crowd...the announcer would not start speaking until his stopwatch ticked-off the right length, so the game could re-join smoothly.

    You would have to have a live guy engineering at your station, because you would need to recognize the verbal cue the guy calling the game, would use to trigger local breaks, which would be different from the network-break outcue.
     
    altaeria likes this.
  21. Vahan

    Vahan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glendale, CA, USA
    If you picked up early Syndicated and daytime reruns of classic shows, they continued to keep the bumpers.
     
  22. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

    One iteration of this became a meme a few years ago thanks to the Eric Andre show:



    We'll Be Right Back | Know Your Meme
     
    mr. steak and altaeria like this.
  23. The Wanderer

    The Wanderer Seeker of Truth

    Location:
    NYC
    Bumpers interfere with commercials
     
  24. MLutthans

    MLutthans That's my spaghetti, Chewbacca! Staff

  25. vince

    vince Stan Ricker's son-in-law

    Adult Swim's 'bumpers', the back screen with the small writing, is a wonderful tradition.
     
    BeatleJWOL likes this.
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