Commercials

I just ordered a ROKU internet box for my TV. $80 from Amazon. I spent a couple of hours reading about different devices this morning and finally decided cheaper is better. Not cheapest, next to cheapest. We shall see.

We have a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) that we rent from Frontier (formerly Verizon) for the ridiculous price of $30 a month, but we use the heck out of it. We can watch whatever dramas we want when we are ready, not just when they come on, and we don't have to sit through the ads, though we still have to futz with the fast forward and reverse buttons to skip over the ads, and that can be tedious.

I find most TV commercials are extremely boring and / or annoying, but there are also some that are very clever that I don't mind seeing. Once. Once is usually enough. More than that and they quickly become annoying. So I was thinking, how about a commercial channel? All commercials all the time! If you ever wanted to see what was going on in commercial land you could switch to that channel and in an hour you could probably watch all the new commercials made in the last week. Get your fix of mass marketing all at once.

Then I got to wondering how much a TV show is worth. It takes a bunch of money to produce a TV drama, just guessing I would say maybe a million dollars an episode. I mean just look at all the people listed in the credits, all the locations, all the props. And you have to produce the episode in a week. I think a million bucks is a fair estimate. But the show gets broadcast to millions of viewers. There are about 15 minutes of commercials in each one hour of broadcast time, so if you are charging a $100,000 (one hundred thousand dollars) per minute, you could bring in 1.5 million dollars, which would make the whole endeavor worth while. If a million people watch the show, then the advertisers are paying a buck-fifty for every viewer, and since only about half of the ads are watched, and only ten percent of them are actually in the advertisers sights, the advertisers are paying $30 for each viewer, or $1 per viewer per 30 second commercial.

Of course, any one of these numbers could be off by a factor of ten or even a hundred, which would make all my carefully wrought calculations worthless, but I think I am hitting pretty close to the mark. A show needs to pay for itself up front, broadcasters aren't going to waste valuable air time on something that isn't paying for itself. After the initial prime time broadcast things can get a little easier. The show has already paid for itself, so any money that can be made now is gravy. Remember the printing press model of capitalism.

All of which is a long way of saying that one dollar per hour of commercial free video entertainment is a fair price.