How do people watch TV in the US with all these commercial breaks?

I hardly watch TV anymore, but you can always mess around with your smartphone during the commercial breaks. Dunno why companies continue spending millions on ads when they clearly don't work as well as they did decades ago, can't remember the last time an ad got me to buy something

It's not even the volume of ads. that is really the issue (I don't think commercial [i.e. non-BBC] UK TV is all that different in that regard) - it's the frequency. It feels like every few minutes you're hitting another block of ads AND they've started appearing as banners in the shows themselves. It's just a bad experience IMO.

Incidentally, it does make it easier to wait for the show to hit Netflix etc. rather than looking for a more dubious source, so it does have that going for it I guess......

If you like live sports, there isn't much choice.

I cancelled cable and got Youtube TV a few months ago. The commercials are still there, but at least it's a lot cheaper.

As many others have stated, the answer is people don't, which in turn increases the volume of commercials as eyeballs decrease.

One thing that got me with American television is the amount of adds for drugs/healthcare, it was just a weird and totally foreign concept to me

(warning, may cause illness,loss of blood, stroke or death)

Fast forward

Uhh, just use DVR. Haven't watched anything live in the past 10 years other than sports.

Don't watch TV is my solution

Why do you think cord cutting is a thing?

Also, I never watch tv live anymore. I suspect most people just DVR and watch later. That's if they have cable at all.

It's also not really the amount of ad's but the content. When Michael Jackson died I was in LA on holiday and was watching CNN and they were talking about the role of prescription meds on his death. Then whenever it cut to commercials I shit you not the first bunch of commercials were for prescription meds.

Whatever. It's free and they have to make a couple bucks somehow. Just do a few push ups during the ad breaks.

oh thats easy...don't watch tv

My family just stopped. We got a Roku stick and am about to buy an antenna. Also, cable just costs too much.

To be fair, I watch a lot of cricket; so I end up watching UK tv streams and it seems like there's just as many ads. And if you want to talk about shitty commercials, sweet jesus its just soccer and fucking betting.

I dont watch TV in the UK because of the constant ad breaks, the BBC is not so bad but I'm also not gonna pay £12 a month for a TV license when I get Netflix for almost half that and can watch whatever, whenever I like (and it's got most of the good BBC stuff on there anyway).

Scheduled TV is dying and I'll be glad to see it gone. Heard that US TV was worse (we get every 15 mins, maybe shorter for some of the shittier channels and thats bad enough). I won't tolerate ads in any form for any medium any more, if I can't subvert them then I go somewhere or use something else where I can.

I think that sort of like adblockers on the internet, ways of getting around commercials are so widespread that the value of a commercial has dropped, so stations that rely on commercials to generate revenue have had to increase the quantity to compensate. But there's still really no better way to communicate a coherent, unsolicited message to customers, so it hasn't gone away.

Yeah, TV watching has dropped off sharply in the US, hence the increase in ads. TV providers are now focusing on the elderly audience (hence a lot of commercials for medicine/healthcare) who made a tradition of watching it, as they're finding it increasingly hard to get younger generations to watch. Even my 60-yr old parents are thinking about cutting the cable because of how little of it they watch.

@sammo21: 10 months late to this, I know... But the reason you saw more ads during that RAW piece of TV is because the show you were likely watching was made for a Network in USA, so the production is tailored around that. This means that other networks from around the world who distribute such a show have to run ad breaks during these slots too - otherwise you'd just be staring at a blank screen, or a logo, for 5 minutes every 10 minutes. As someone who likes watching the smack be layeth down, I can assure you that the level of advertising during these shows is almost an absolute anomaly compared to the rest of UK television.

Only other times it happens here? MLB, NFL, NASCAR, etc.

UK commercial channels (i.e non-BBC) have way less ad breaks than American TV. However, that has been slowly shifting throughout the years due to the 'less eyeballs on TV' problem. So both are getting worse - but evidently both started at different positions due to cultural and societal reasons.

As such, I don't think UK TV ads today are even anywhere near as prevelant as the American TV ads I saw when I visited there about two decades ago...

@nuttyjawa: I am pretty libertarian but I would totally support keeping ads for prescription medication off of the air. Those things just make people think they have something.