I watched CBS4 This Morning and whoever came up with the genius idea of shaving 5 minutes of ads for each half hour newscast needs to be awarded some cookies. I watched the last half hour of news 6:30am to 7:00am, they started at 6:29 and went commercial free to about 6:50am I think. The rest of the time they varied content with ad breaks as they normaly would.
The whole newscast felt watchable and had more continuity feel to it although without the ads weather and traffic kind of feel repetative. Weather especially since the forecast doesn’t change at all.
Nice move though, it would be nice if all newscasts had half the ads. It would be interesting to see if other stations adopt the formula. Of course some pocket books are bound to be hit, unless they charge double the rate, but with DVRs becoming more common I’m not sure 30 second ads are what they used to be.
