Godless Commie

iTrader: (2)

Joe, watching football (the real variety, with the round ball) on a large HD screen is an epic experience.

On a side note, as an American citizen, I do admit and believe American football is just a sorry excuse for airing commercials for about three and a half hours.

Reverant

iTrader: (10)

Yeah, I know that trick and it works wonders.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

I've tried running noise through my tv for 3 days straight to get rid of the food network logo...no avail.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

I just heard this one..

Scientist have discovered traces of female hormones in alcohol. To test this theory they gave 100 men 12 pints of beer each. Their theory was proven correct after 100% of the men began to talk nonsense and lost the ability to drive.



Also

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yeah, they do limit the size of the magazines you're allowed to have on your assault rifles, and they even prohibit the importation of new AR-15s (and derivative models) by name, though of course you can buy an off-list lower receiver in order to make one qualify as legal. The magazine capacity thing does kind of suck if you find yourself in a position where it's necessary to eliminate more than 10 moles from your garden in rapid succession without stopping to pop in a new magazine. Fortunately, handguns are pretty much unlimited, and far easier to keep in the bedside table or the glovebox.

I didn't mean to imply that California is a land of milk & honey (well, technically it is, so that's a bad metaphor), merely to point out the irony in how many folks consider the PRC to be a communist state, whereas our handgun laws are apparently rather more relaxed then some other states which are known principally for having lots of orange-colored people with spikey hair and popped collars.


I'm sure it is.

I just don't care about football in any form. Or golf, or baseball, or hockey, or basketball, or tennis, or any other "ball and zone" sport.


Are you kidding me? All of American television programming in general is just something to fill the space between commercials. I'm not trying to be funny, that's how the business model for broadcasting works in this country. Doesn't matter whether it's football, CSI, the evening news, or live coverage of the 2012 "Shooting Someone in the Butthole with a Nerf Gun" championship.

About the only exception to this rule is when the President gives a live speech on TV. Out of respect, they usually don't air advertising during speeches. I predict that this will eventually change; there's no reason why a broadcaster can't run "banner ads" in the crawl-space at the bottom of the picture during a presidential speech.

pusha

iTrader: (5)

Joe, where are you moving now?

gearhead_318

iTrader: (1)

Dude, you know everything...

Isn't there some law about not being able to keep a loaded handgun in a car, and since the (dumb) law say the magazine is part of the gun, you can't have bullets in the magazine?

y8s

iTrader: (8)

GOD DAMMIT

I post a cool gun pic just because it's a pic thread and you all twist this into the gun politics thread again.

someone post some religion jokes or something.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Ok.

A priest and a rabbi are at the YMCA. A group of young boys clad in swimsuits walks past, on their way to the pool.

"I'd like to screw every one of them," remarks the priest.

"Out of what?" asks the rabbi.

Godless Commie

iTrader: (2)

I am quite familiar with the broadcasting methods and structuring, Joe..

This is exactly why I download my favorite TV shows (no-quota 8MB connection) and watch them commercial free, once we call it a day in the evening.
A home office can be very cool that way. Grab your tea and move to the living room

Still, I must add, soccer seems to be the exception to the "wrapped around commercials" rule. No broadcaster in their right mind would even dare to interrupt a soccer game. Commercials are for half time only.

Maybe my passion for soccer is because I actively played soccer till the tender age of 45 five years ago, when a (not soccer related) serious back injury and an emergency surgery forced me away from the pitch.
I used to be a goalkeeper, and I was the captain of the 6 of the seven teams my club was fielding at the time. That meant I was playing six games every week.. (the seventh team was in the ladies' league).

Now that I am unable to play anymore, I watch.

And, yeah, I turned 50 about 10 weeks ago.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

That's quite interesting, actually.

I've never really watched Euro-football on television, either here in the states or in Europe. I have occasionally caught parts of Mexican broadcasts of football matches (here in San Diego we get a lot of Mexican TV stations, and they're usually tuned in on a set somewhere overhead in the more authentic Mexican restaurants), however I don't specifically recall the commercial placement.

In US football, we've evolved to the point where the game itself has actually been re-structured to accommodate television, rather than the other way around. The NFL's broadcast contract, for instance, stipulates that each game shall contain precisely 10 commercial breaks per half. Normally, these breaks are taken when in-game events create a natural break in the gameplay, such as after a touchdown, during a coaches' timeout, at the end of a quarter, in the event of a player injury, and so forth.

However, if gameplay has been such that not a lot of natural breaks have occurred, then whichever broadcaster is "sourcing" the game can actually call for a timeout independent of any game-related activity. There is actually a person standing on the sidelines (typically wearing orange gloves) whose sole function is to act as a liaison between the producer back in the TV truck outside the stadium and the referees. If the TV network needs to take a commercial break, this person will signal to the referee that a "TV Timeout" is needed, in which case the referees will actually halt play, stop the game clock, and effectively pause the entire game right there on the field until the Network signals that the break is finished, and the Man in the Orange Gloves signals to the referee that they may resume the game.

Can you imagine if the TV networks had the authority to declare a yellow flag in an F1 (or NASCAR) race?

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

I'd be curious to see a comparison of advertising revenue for the NFL-style structure (game extended by constant commercial breaks) to a European soccer-style structure (constant on-screen advertising during the game with no breaks). Would be hard to adjust for all the other differences, I guess.

Godless Commie

iTrader: (2)

I know about TV Timeouts. Despicable.

I can see NASCAR doing it.. They throw the yellow at whatever chance they get, anyway..
F1, that would be rough. For the cars, I mean. Have you seen an F1 clutchpack up close? An unreal, and incredibly fragile looking 10 Cm diameter cage with four thin wafers discs in it..

On a side note, The first ever US broadcast of a World Cup (back in 1990 IIRC) was a complete disaster.
The broadcasting company actually cut away to commercials DURING the game, and missed a critical goal.
I remember the uproar, and the reaction they had received.
That was the first and the only game they cut to commercials during the World Cup..

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I had not until you mentioned it.

Looks a lot like a motorcycle clutch, except I imagine that the clutch runs dry rather than being immersed in oil.





Interesting.

In many ways, I suspect that the nature of sports which are native to the US are of a very different structure with regard to pacing.

In European football, for example, the pace of the game is quite fast. In some ways, it's similar to basketball, in that there is no distinction between an "offensive" team and a "defensive" team, so the same set of players (more or less) are always on the field. After a scoring event, gameplay immediately continues as before with no interruption.


Baseball is exactly the opposite, with a large number of natural breaks built into the structure of the game. By definition, the entire set of players is swapped out after every three outs (twice per inning) so by definition, you have 16-17 natural pauses in the action where the game has to stop so that one team can leave the field and the other can enter the field and establish a defensive position. These are perfect opportunities for commercial insertion. Similar pauses occur when a defensive player (generally the pitcher) is swapped out in the middle of an inning, as the new pitcher is generally permitted time to "warm up" before play resumes.

My very first job in broadcasting was running the board for a local AM radio station during ball games, and pitching changes were the bane of my existence. Normally you could more or less predict when innings were going to end, and time your other activities in the station (making coffee, urinating, taking transmitter logs, etc) so that you were always sitting at the console ready for the commercial break when it came. Pitching changes, by comparison, tend to just come out of nowhere with very little warning, and you usually only had about 10-15 seconds to get into position for one based on the announcer's cues. This is the primary reason why the carpet just outside the restroom smells like urine at most radio stations which carry live sporting events.

It's also the reason why I eventually installed a pushbutton inside the restroom at WKII, which allowed me to simultaneously disconnect the satellite feed and start a commercial playing in the cart machine while standing at the toilet. This buys you an extra 30 seconds to finish your business in an orderly fashion and get back into the control room. I remember having a rather interesting conversation about that modification with the owner of the station after he discovered it.


In American football, gameplay is even stranger. A similar switching of players and positions occurs not just at every single scoring event, but any time the offensive players make four plays without achieving a 10 yard gain. The number of times which this can occur is essentially limitless, though at the opposite extreme its also theoretically possible that no such breaks could occur at all. (A single team could hold possession of the ball for an entire half, neither achieving a goal nor forfeiting possession of the ball, simply by alternating between periods of incremental gain in field position and instantaneous large losses of field position as by a reverse-pass.)

There is also a large show of theatrics which involves each scoring event, including the "extra point" kick, which has its own special set of players to be brought onto the field, along with a physical reconfiguration of the end-zone.

So it's a very slow game, with lots of inherent breaks in the action. I honestly don't think that eliminating commercials from it would change the length of an average game by more than a few minutes.



And then there's Golf.

Godless Commie

iTrader: (2)

I'm quite familiar with console antics. My ex was a radio personality. I spent a lot of time at the studio, and I used to set up the "marty" for remote events..

elesjuan

iTrader: (11)

I bought an LG 50PK750 a few months ago, 1080p, 600hz, blah blah blah.

Picture looks perfect, full motion with great refresh, built in netflix fagggotry, and a little undocumented feature where you can plug in a USB HDD and play downloaded/ripped movies of most any format in 1080p/AC3.



Bought it at NFM for $799.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

??

Pen2_the_penguin

iTrader: (4)

terrible acoustics placement, breh.

Godless Commie

iTrader: (2)

I was just debating whether or not I should post something to that effect.
Didn't wanna rain on his parade..

Oh well, TV is too high, too. There.

pusha

iTrader: (5)

it's also really small, like his *****