Why do shows made for streaming companies still have obvious commercial breaks?
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Streaming shows have pretend breaks to keep you interested, like TV shows with real commercials do. It’s to make the story more exciting.
Prime just notified us that they are going to insert commercials into their movies. For $3 a month they will let us watch them commercial free.
Just because they aren’t currently showing commercials now doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.
A few reasons (mostly financial):
The show isn’t exclusively made for the streaming service. It may be a co-production between, say, Netflix in the US and CBC in Canada. It’s easier to make a single version of the show that fits both markets.
The show was an acquisition from a traditional broadcaster with existing ad breaks. It’s easiest and cheapest just to cut out the gaps and leave the show structured as it is.
The show was made for the streaming service but with future sales to other markets in mind, probably international ones. These usually require ad breaks, so it’s easiest to bake them in now.
EDIT: That last case could include making it easy to insert adverts on the platform, as many others have commented. This is very plausible, but I just wanted to add that I’m yet to see it stated explicitly in any production guidelines.
I imagine it’s probably a combination of writers used to writing for traditional broadcast/cable TV and just having those cadences worked into their brains, and/or the fact that it’s something viewers are used to – that dramatic pause and fade to black right before or after a big plot element, that it feels more natural even if there’s no actual commercial break.
There are a lot of things about TV and movies that are done because it’s the way they’ve always been done. The 24fps of films and high quality TV for instance is an artificial limitation these days, but because it was the way things were for so long if we see a movie or TV show filmed at a high frame rate our immediate response is that it looks cheap and tacky because that kind of smooth motion was always associated with soap operas and other low quality broadcasts.
Because stories are written in 3 acts, and between the acts is where the commercials usually go.
Commercials happen where they do because of the story structure, not the other way around.
Shows for network tv were written to have act breaks right before the commercials. You see this even in plays and movies when things come to a stop and the storytelling changes or you move to a new perspective. Think also new chapter in a book. It’s a natural way of telling stories that made its way to television and was capitalized on for ad breaks.
Act breaks are still a thing?
The 3 act and 5 act structure of theatre goes back literally thousands of years. Television and film simply picked up that form and used it, in part because playwrights were the first screenwriters. Advertisements between acts was the obvious way to insert advertising into scripted television. 3 act and 5 act scripts would continue to be the norm even if all advertising suddenly disappeared from the earth.
(1 act and 2 act are also common forms, but much less common in half hour or hour long serial dramas and comedies)
We are at a point where most streaming services have, or have announced to introducing ad supported tiers. Hulu has ads, Netflix has ads, Prime has announced they are bringing ads.
They probably have just left the “ad space” because they had always planned to create these ad supported tiers.
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