Nineteen- Oh, About Seventy-Six?

I don't watch much television these days: The Simpsons, of course, and...um...that's about it, really. I'd watch The Powerpuff Girls if (1.) I had cable and (2.) it was still on. Ditto for Red Dwarf. I used to watch Nova until it became "The Mighty American Aircraft Carrier and Submarine Show" several years ago.

Now that everything is available on DVD, the (1.) shorter time investment per episode because of (2.) no commercials, (3.) the on-demand scheduling, and (4) Netflix fees that are less than half those of Extended Basic Cable make it my preferred source for television shows.

And lurking on the horizon is yet another reason to avoid programmed television: mandatory commercial watching. In fact, this appears to have reached the test-market stage:

I'm a truck driver. At Flying-J truckstops, they provide satellite TV for truck drivers. You can change the channel during any movie or program, but not during the commercials.

You are forced to watch the commercials before the channel can be changed. [magni_2nd, on a Yahoo! News Message Board]

There is a miniscule possibility that the irritation this would generate could lead to better television shows: I mean, if they're going to make you watch the commercials, they'd damned well better be airing something for which it's worth sitting through them. Don't hold your breath, though: the "market" being tested is not the viewers' – at least not directly –, it's the advertisers'. If what the advertisers see makes them happy, the practice will spread. I'm utterly ignorant of advertising [and nearly so of economics], but I imagine what would make advertisers happy is not limited to increased revenues. I would bet that they would tolerate some decrease in overall revenues for greater predictability, for instance if weekly or monthly or seasonal variability were smoothed out.

(What's truly going to suck, of course, is when they start inserting commercials into DVDs and making it impossible to skip over them [the way you can't skip over that stupid INTERPOL warning that shows up at the beginning of every DVD and loiters on your screen for an hour or two before letting you watch whatever it was you were going to watch].)

But this just seems to be part of an emerging state of affairs that I find worrisome and problematic: namely, the growing tendency of the heretofore latent corporate power to effect public policy de facto to manifest itself.