The Time Costs of My Thanksgiving Television

About five years ago I gave up cable TV and never looked back.  I've saved hours on my life, countless brain cells, and upwards of $50 each month, so let's say between $2,000 and $3,000 - oh Jesus - and counting.  Between Hulu.com, ordering entire seasons through Netflix, and the TVs at the gym I still manage to get a satisfying programming fix.  About ten TVs play simultaneously at the gym, and I'm always revlived to confirm that there really is nothing on aside from Law & Order episodes and a seemingly daily marathon of Kim Kardashian's wedding, which even her divorce isn't stopping.

My mother still subscribes to cable, and when I visit during holidays it's a chance to catch up on what I've been missing (for some reason when we watch together the intersection on what everyone can tolerate is HGTV renovation shows).  Fortunately, during the holidays there are always lots of good movies.  Since Wednesday I've watched four classics: Gone with the Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Miracle on 34th Street, and The Godfather last night.  Although The Godfather is really really good I found I increasingly dreaded the coming commercial breaks.  This was especially due to these very bad Walmart commercials that kept playing.  Often during the same commercial cycle Walmart took out multiple Black Friday ads.  The more I watched the more annoying they became.  I covered my ears to avoid the torture.  I felt I was being brainwashed.

I don't usually watch so much TV, and I wanted to figure out how much of my life I was giving up to commercials to watch these movies.  The metrics are easy.  Take a typical sitcom, slotted 8-8:30 (30 minutes) which is well-know to only be about 22 minutes of programming.  Nothing is for free, and so even analog users "pay" to watch the shows by sitting through 8 minutes of commercials (cable users pay twice, via commercials and cable bills).  In a sense, each minute of commercials "buys" 1.4 minutes of sitcom programming for the viewer.

I calculated the minutes of movie purchased by each commercial minute for the four movies I'd watched.  The slotted times were easy to remember or look-up from yesterday's TV listings.  In terms how that time divides into movies and commercials, I discovered that when you enter [movie name] running time into the Google search bar you are given an estimate of the film's running time, pulled from wikipedia.org, amazon.com, fairly reliable sources.  Of course there could be further editing for TV, but I ignore that for now.

The results are below.  The abbreviation "mb" stands for number of "minutes bought" of the movie by each minute of commercial.

• Gone with the Wind: Slotted for 300 minutes, Run Time 222 minutes - 2.8mb
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: Slotted for 95 minutes, Run Time 83 minutes - 6.9mb
• Miracle on 34th Street: Slotted for 120 minutes, Run Time 96 minutes - 4.0mb
• The Godfather: Slotted for 240, Run Time 175 - 2.7mb

Longer movies are clearly much more time expensive - The Godfather was 2.5x more so than Snow White.  Each minute of commercial break during Snow White bought almost seven minutes of movie.  My interpretation is that longer movies allow the advertisers to fit more commercials in.  There's no volume discount here.  On the other hand, a minute of 30-minute sitcom commercials only buys 1.4 minutes of programming, the most expensive of all.  A more complete analysis would account for more characteristics - all else equal, programming with more desirability (perhaps prime-time sitcoms vs. cable movie reruns) should be more time expensive.  There is also already an existing price mechanism in how much advertisers pay for the privilege of airing commercials - it would be interesting to see in what cases that cost is shirted to viewers or borne by advertisers.

Lastly, the quality of commercials was not accounted for here, but makes a big difference, too.  The Walmart Black Friday commercials last night were particularly tedious, and unfortunately more frequent.