Saturday, November 17, 2007

Those annoying pop up ads and TV logos

You’ve seen it before. You’re watching a TV show (TNT is the worst offender), and suddenly you see an actor pop up on your screen with a huge banner touting a future airing of their TV show. Or, a crawl line may appear across the screen, reminding you of another TV show or sporting event. Then there are the ubiquitous channel logos, which are always in a spot on the screen where it’s always obscuring something. And don’t forget the local channels that love to interrupt programming to put a weather warning up there with crawl lines AND radar boxes. Sometimes these things can happen all at once, and one finds the picture for the show getting smaller and smaller. Maybe this is why we need these huge TV screens now?

There’s got to be a better way.

With the proliferation of DVRs and new technology in general, wouldn’t it be nice if someone invented a way that your DVR can suppress – or show - all this information while viewing the show? After all, most TVs allow one to chose whether to show closed captioning. Or, as in the case of weather alerts, it would be great if using the DVR and a button on the remote could chose whether or not to see them. All the stations would need to do it put something like a small symbol in the screen to signal if there is some weather alert, or the all too frequent “BREAKING NEWS” alert, that you may want to look at briefly. (Don’t get me started on those breaking news alerts; I’ll save that for a later time.)

I’m really not looking to the day when I have to get a 50+ inch screen TV, just so I can get a picture big enough so I can see the actual programming through all the alerts, ads, and logos!

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd like to think there was a possibility these things would go away, but there's no chance of that.

The Provider Stations have spoken on this issue and they said something to the effect of less then 1% of viewers have complained about these "DOGs/BUGs", so obviously the viewers don't mind them.
They have even went so far as to say that "Younger audiences seem to like the logos as they never knew programming content without them"

A few web sites tried to rally the troops against these intrusions, (stopthelogos-dot-com, whatvideotv-dot-com, 625.uk-dot-com/dogwatch/ )
but most have long since given up and joined the other sheep.

Now, be a good little viewer and go watch more Iconic-TV now... we can cover up as much of your screen as we like. You have no choice! ! !
Don't even think about boycotting channels with logos.

I Like to Watch TV said...

What's interesting is a lot of our local TV news channels have gotten rid of the crawl lines which drew constant crticism, so there may be some hope!