"NY" wrote in message
o.uk...
"Harry Bloomfield" wrote in message
...
Not if there still is a significant spike when the ads come on TV.

So the TV broadcasters need to be encouraged to stagger their ad break
times. A modern TV which can use a HDD to pause a program helps to ease
the network load peaks.

I'm probably an exception: I record everything that I want to watch, and
rarely watch anything as it is broadcast,

I quite literally never watch anything live now. I much prefer
to watch stuff when I choose to watch it and don't bother
with TV news anymore, I prefer a text feed for news like
https://www.abc.net.au/news/justin/

and I edit out the adverts so I can watch a drama uninterrupted by three
breaks per hour.

I don't bother, mainly because most of what I watch
is broadcast on our ABC which has no embedded ads,
just ads for their own programs between programs.

I do watch some other stuff with embedded ads,
but very little drama that way. I have my two main
players setup with a single button jump over the
bulk of the ads and with another button which
does a much smaller jump over the few extra
ads after the main big jump of 2 minutes.

Even if I watch "live" it's actually delayed a little while on the
recorder so I can edit out the breaks on-the-fly and still finish watching
at about the same time as it's going out live

I don't ever watch like that although I can do if I want
to. Mainly because they hardly ever broadcast what
I want to watch at the time I want to watch it.

I have a pathological hatred of being force-fed with adverts.

I'm not that gung ho and do sometimes see an ad
for something that interests me like an ad for this.
http://www.losttrades.info/

But I know I'm in the minority.

Yeah, we certainly are.

Apparently at one time (maybe still to this day) broadcasters used to
inform power-generation companies of the exact times of each day's ad
breaks in Coronation Street, Crossroads, Emmerdale etc, so the power
stations knew exactly when to start up the booster generation plants to
cope with the peaks - so they were prepared and were doing it in advance
rather than reacting to demand that had already begun. It is also said
that they used the size of the peak to gauge how many people were watching
that day: "ah, today's Corrie has only had a 2 MW advert peak - not as
many people watching as yesterday's which was 3 MW" ;-)

Yeah, I'd be surprised if they do now, tho I spose they
might during the olympics or the footy season etc.