How do TV commercials work?

Question

Is someone sitting in a control room somewhere trying to fit commercials in before the live program is back?

In: 0

Answer 1

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Answer 2

It is done by computers nowadays but yes, basically the ads are inserted into the program. Few programs (except news and sports) are live nowadays though. They’re almost all pre-recorded.

Answer 3

Someone presses a button and sends the current airing to go to a commercial. Think of movies, where the producer is standing behind two guys who are watching several television screens, then he makes a call to cut to commercial.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

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Answer 6

It is done by computers nowadays but yes, basically the ads are inserted into the program. Few programs (except news and sports) are live nowadays though. They’re almost all pre-recorded.

Answer 7

It is done by computers nowadays but yes, basically the ads are inserted into the program. Few programs (except news and sports) are live nowadays though. They’re almost all pre-recorded.

Answer 8

Someone presses a button and sends the current airing to go to a commercial. Think of movies, where the producer is standing behind two guys who are watching several television screens, then he makes a call to cut to commercial.

Answer 9

Someone presses a button and sends the current airing to go to a commercial. Think of movies, where the producer is standing behind two guys who are watching several television screens, then he makes a call to cut to commercial.

Answer 10

Each show will have set blocks for ad breaks. The breaks will be of a certain time – e.g. three or five minutes. The ads are usually 30 or 60 seconds long (sometimes 15), so will fit into the ad break block.

For TV shows there is usually a fade in/fade out allowing you to trim to exactly the second for ad breaks, movies will tend to be shown with a “stinger”, the logo of the channel broadcasting generally, or sometimes a title card of the movie.

The shows and ad breaks are all timed by a computer. Sometimes for live sports coverage there will still be people manually throwing to a commercial break, but in general it is all automated now.