I don’t know whether this belongs here or in the Poli/Con forum, but have you noticed that TV stations, especially on cable, will air half a commercial, then interrupt it with another commercial? Do you think they’re trying to get around some of the advertising regulations, or what?
I suspect it has more to do with your TV carrier (cable/satellite/etc.) overwriting the original signal. The original signal may carry ads for companies that don’t have a license with the carrier, so the carrier’s equipment is supposed to recognize the original ad and overwrite the signal with an ad from one of its own customers. Time lag in this second ad coming in may make it look like the half-ad you refer to.
djm
I always assumed that this was the case. A sort of bullying, as it were.
Yeah, normally when this happens the ad is interrupted in favor of a local ad, which makes me think the local provider has permission to do this to certain commercials (or maybe just a certain number of commercials) in order to generate some revenue locally. Or something.
Yes, i do think that TV is half assed … er … wait… that wasn’t exactly what you asked, was it. 
I can’t tell if he assed our opinion or not?
djm is right. Commercial slots are set aside for cable carriers to
slide in local ads, to pay the bills and whatnot. When they preempt
a running ad from the network with a local one, I suspect it is a
scheduling error, like the commercial was supposed to be a 30 sec.
national spot followed by a 30sec. local ad, and the network put up a
1 min. ad instead, or some such. I used to notice that a lot more a few
years ago, so I guess at least Time-Warner is ironing out the problems.
At my last job, we were designing a chip to run cable set-top boxes
and DVRs. Apparantly, part of the new industry standard is that cable
companies can download commercials to a DVR’s harddrive overnight,
and then insert those in the local slots. That way, instead of broadcasting
an ad to their whole market, they could target ads to a particular
region, or neighborhood, or even tailor their ads for each individual
household. Isn’t that exciting? You could have your own personalized
blipverts!
Just before the networks send an ad, they insert some sort of machine-readable code to announce the ad. There was, at one time, a proposal to build a personal video recorder that would recognize these codes and stop recording until the next code came that announced the end of the ad and resumption of the program. There was a tremendous amount of agitation in the tv industry about this for a while. I’m surprised the cablecos can’t use these same codes to know when to jump in with their local ads.
djm
Perhaps they do use that, or something similar, and there’s enough
latency in the system to let some of the national ad through… who
knows what sort of bug could be causing the ad cutoffs. There’s so
many separate systems at work before the signals are put on the
cable, I’m surprised it works as reliably as it does.