I'm not a huge fan of sports; I hardly ever spectate - an occasional game, and often, the Superbowl, which is usually poor football but good dip. Maybe it's because in my career I spent so much time overseas, where U.S. sports might turn up at 3:00 AM or in the middle of the work day, if they turned up at all.
But sometimes the side stories are interesting, like today's Fox Sports feature about what is actually broadcast during a typical NFL game. It turns out that out of the total 60 minutes of game time, the ball is in play for only about 11 minutes. ELEVEN!! About 30 seconds for each of the 22 guys on the field at any given time; and far less if you factor in the offense, the defense, the special teams. The rest of the time is killed as teams huddle, get to the line of scrimmage, unpile, and so on. The same story also points out other interesting stats: for example if 11 minutes out of 60 sounds bad, how does 11 minutes out of three hours (the typical broadcast length) sound? And (shocker!) about 60% of that extra time is devoted to: c-o-m-m-e-r-c-i-a-l-s. Come to think of it, maybe this is why I'm not a regular spectator.
Not that we should be surprised. Most of us have noticed how much time of a regular TV "drama" show is taken up by commercials. By the way, it's more now than it was ten or 15 years ago.
And I once did my own little sample of evening news on television, omitting all the commercials, the teasers ("coming up next..."), the banter between the newscasters -- the result was about 11 minutes (there's that number again) of actual news stories on local news; even less (about 9.5) on network news.
I'm keeping my eye on the bills we pay to receive this flood of advertising and other "uncontent" - there may come a time when it's not worth it.
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