zlacker

> I think we've largely forgotten what live over-the-air television was like for quite a few decades: TV shows and movies split up by blocks of 5-6 30 second ads, including ads for other shows later in the week. We'd either sit through them, bored, or find something else to do. (Or pause recording on the VCR. Heh.)

A big difference between those ad breaks and ad breaks today on many streaming platforms today is that there was coordination between the content producers and the broadcasters over where in the content the ad breaks occurred.

The content producers structured their programs so the ads would occur during good places for the viewer to take a break. Shows for 30 minute slots would be written as 3 acts and shows for 1 hour slots would be written as 5 acts. Sometimes the shows would even acknowledge this in the story, e.g., both The Simpsons and Futurama had stories where right at the end of the act a character says they are going to 2 or 3 minutes to think about some problem, and then it immediately goes into the ad break, and when it comes back the character has just finished figuring out the answer.

It was also easier to find something to do during a 3ish minute ad break than it is during the shorter ad breaks common on streaming platforms today. With a 3ish minute ad break when I was a kid, I'd just start reading a magazine or the day's newspaper. With short ad breaks there often isn't time to do anything meaningful. Even though the modern platform might have less total ad time, the total of "time actually watching the program" plus "time doing useful things during ad breaks" in an hour of watching for me was probably more for OTA back then than it is for many of today's ad-based streaming services.