Last night, for the first time in a long time, I tried to watch a film on TV2. Normally I don’t watch NZ TV at all, except for the news, and often not even that. 

What I noticed from the film was the old trick of stuffing more and more commercial breaks into the broadcast as it neared the end. Fortunately I didn’t really want to see the film, because the avalanche of ceaseless commercials made it completely unwatchable. 

In the past I used to record things like this, which is easy to do, and skip past the commercials, but these days I can’t be bothered. There is so much content out there that doesn’t try to annoy me so why waste any effort on this kind of thing?

In addition to the many ad-free paid services, there are also many supported by advertising that can be viewed without charge. But even these do not begin to have the volume and frequency of commercials that NZ broadcasters impose on their viewers.  I don’t like ads and I usually avoid them, but I can live with a few at decent intervals if there is something I really want to watch. I stay away from pirated material and I feel that putting up with some ads in exchange for free content is a reasonable transaction. But the volume and frequency of advertising on NZ TV is not reasonable. I am amazed that anyone at all still watches it.

I support the efforts to create an add-free public service broadcaster in New Zealand, though I think it is much too little far too late. That horse has already bolted. What I find unfathomable, is that our dinosaur FTA services still seem to think they are operating in the 20th century, with a captive audience and no meaningful competition. I am reminded of a striking scene in the nuclear war film The Day After, in which a woman compulsively makes beds as her husband tries to get her to the shelter. This is classic displacement behaviour, doing something familiar to avoid confronting something too horrible to contemplate. That seems to me a pretty good description of New Zealand broadcasting at this time. Instead of actually trying to move with the times and find ways of surviving in a changing world, our FTA broadcasters seem determined to just keep on doing the same old same old with their heads planted in the sand as their markets dissipate into nothingness. No wonder TV Three is going under. It won’t be long before the others follow.