Is it a problem in the control room of the TV station? Is it overbooking of commercial spots? Why do I sometimes see a commercial play for about 1 second, and then it cuts out and another compliantly different commercial plays instead?
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Usually this happens when a local station’s feed (Channel 7 Detroit) cuts over from their local control room to the national feed (ABC central). Like after your 11 oc clock news and it cuts over to the national nightly news or a late show.
The national feed is coming via satellite, and the synchronization is sometimes off by a second or two.
Could be different reasons – one of the ones we experience a lot in Canada is that stations kind of ‘rent’ shows, by piggybacking on broadcasting. A Canadian station will pay an affiliate US station a license fee to air a show. So they will use the America airing and then interrupt the broadcast to air Canadian commercials during the breaks.
A similar thing happens with smaller stations in the US. Like a smaller city may have its own FOX or NBC or CBS station, they air the main broadcast but may insert different commercials, like a regional one, during the breaks.
Commercials could be from two or three sources. The network has a commercial there and the local station then cuts that one out and places a local one in its place. There are signals that tell them when a commercial is starting and sometimes the equipment starts the local one a little late.
In Canada we see this more as a lot of commercials are replaced with Canadian versions vs US versions.
In Canada we see very few of the US commercials during Superbowl and the US stations are replaced with Canadian ones.
Syndicated programming comes pre-loaded with commercials from the distributor. Depending on the deal the local station might have the right to replace some of those ads with their own. Probably you’ll notice that one second ad is a nationally applicable ad (Gold Bond, McDonalds, Toyota, etc.) and the replacement is something local (Bob’s Xlnt Used Cars, local jewelers, etc.). It’s probably the automatic ad replacer is a little slow, it could also be some board op who is a little slow.
We also see this happening with cable stations, where the cable company cuts in local commercials in place of the national broadcaster’s commercial..
What about commercials that get cut off at the last second right over the phone number? You would think that the guy who bought that advertisement is going to be pissed.
There are several ad sources: local, national and sometimes some kind of overide. Normally in a national TV show there is a lot of computer coordination for what is shown when – the show, an ad, station identification, etc. so the computer send control codes to signal what should be playing when. And sometimes this screws up and couple seconds later it gets corrected.
I had this problem watching Babylon 5 reruns, although in my case the commercials were playinh over the show. Called the local TV station and got a tech who was intrigued and figured it out. Network vs local commercials that were stepping on each other. He fixed it and I never had the problem again.
This may be due to localised broadcasts. In different cities channels show different ads, so every now and then an ad from “original” broadcast slips into.
Actually hard to tell without seeing. 🙂
Ads are inserted by not only the national stations, local stations but also your tv provider. With the widespread use of iptv and otttv your provider can insert ads based upon the user and their watch history, and locale. Source I work for a fiber company that also does iptv
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