Gawker 
Enter your username and password.
New York, 2:59 PM
Wed Nov 25
55 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip Your Editors:
tips@gawker.com
Tipline: 646-214-8138
Editor-in-Chief:
Gabriel Snyder | Email
West Coast Editor:
Richard Rushfield | Email
Contributing Editors:
Valleywag:
Ryan Tate | Email
Media:
Hamilton Nolan | Email
Politics:
Alex Pareene | Email
Investigations:
John Cook | Email
Entertainment:
Brian Moylan | Email
Nights:
Adrian Chen | Email
Azaria Jagger | Email
Ravi Somaiya | Email
Weekends:
Foster Kamer | Email
Video Editor:
Richard Blakeley | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
09/08/09
Oh, and I agree ... I pay a fortune for cable, so I'm bummed to have to watch so many commercials (even on cable). Can't we just adopt the BBC model of charging a fee in exchange for commercials? I know I could live with less Viagra vignettes in my life.
09/08/09
09/08/09
09/08/09
09/08/09
And btw, don't try to tell me that that $100 per month goes to the cable company and not the channels. Because first of all, it isn't true. The channels do get some of that money, even the non-premiums - otherwise many of them couldn't exist. And secondly, as a consumer, it doesn't matter - if I'm paying $100 every month for something, I don't give a rat's ass where the money actually goes, that's for all those jerks in the industry to figure out. All I know is I'm paying a lot of money for TV and I shouldn't be forced to sit through ads.
09/08/09
The fact is this. Content is expensive, hugely expensive. The average primetime scripted drama costs upwards of 2 million dollars an hour to produce, and that's just the raw production cost, the cost of yelling "action!" on a fully staffed set.
From development, to production, to broadcast, to packaging, marketing and promotions you can add another 3 or 4 million per episode to that cost. So now you're talking between 5 and 6 million per episode. Multiply that over the course of a 22 episode season and you're talking about 110 million dollars of basic costs per season to bring a first-tier scripted drama to air.
A large enough revenue stream to pay for all that is tenuous already, and that's WITH sub fees, ads, product placement, cross promo tie-ins and what-have-you. Now, put us in the middle of a cratered ad market, and you have a cash-starved industry that will look at any option, no matter how tacky, to get revenues up.
This is also, of course, why so many cable (and broadcast) shows are reality shows, or clip reel/b-roll countdown shows. Production is cheap or consists of pre-owned library footage.
Thus, so-called "value added" content, like in-show ads, on a cheap to produce, guaranteed eyeball grabber like the new Leno show are a no-brainer if you're a network executive.