h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Tried to psot this on the PoV thread, without success:-

Just a general question about Freeview and commercials. Since going digital, I have noticed this and I suspect it's somehow done deliberately.

If I'm on one channel, and an advertising break comes on, I might then channel-hop, with the intention of escaping the commercials that I've seen a dozen times before, and which aren't really that interesting. Who knows, there might be something interesting a few clicks down the dial, on one of the other stations, that's worth watching for a minute or two before going back to my original show after the commercials are finished.

Yet when the commercials are on one Freeview channel, they also seem to be on every commercial channel simultaneously so there's no escaping them, unless you go to the BBC, or (Supernatural entities help me) 24-hour overpriced rubbish on QVC. (Which is just one long commercial break anyway).

Is this done deliberately, so as to reassure the advertisers that it all evens out in the long run and that their commercials WILL be seen? I wouldn't put it past them to maximise revenue in this way by synchronising the commercial breaks.

Also, when you play with the control and bring up the lower-part-of-the-screen text bar, that tells you what's on all the other channels while you're watching BBC3, it might tell you programme Z is just starting on Channel Y, or that Programme Z has five minutes to run. But this takes no account of commercial breaks, so that you're not actually seeing the last five minutes of Programme Z - it has in fact already finished, and you're looking at the commercial break/trailers after the end of the show. Surely this can be better organised, so it will tell you "currently running commercials during a showing of..." during a break? Or is this deliberate policy to keep this vague and fuzzy as well?


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"This message has been blocked as it contains a word which other users may find offensive. Please edit your message and post it again.
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OK, where's the offensive word? Wouldn't have been "{young, inexperienced and naive in the ways of the world} which is also a six-letter word beginning with "V", would it, which is in fact the name of a TV station? Or my description of the general quality of goods on QVC?