- I get questions a lot in the comment sections
about commercials.
So I thought I would dig into this.
The question specifically is, are some streaming services
better than others when it comes to
the amount of commercials that you have to watch?
Well, it's a good question.
And so I decided to dig in and frankly,
I wasn't really expecting to find anything very interesting,
but lo and behold, I did find some interesting stuff.
So if you want to see what I found as far as commercials,
so that you can get the most out of your
cord cutting experience, then come with me, let's dive in.
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All right, let's dig in.
When it comes to commercials on streaming services,
you might think, I don't really care that much.
I only use Netflix.
And so I don't have to deal with commercials
or I'm gonna pay for the Hulu premium plan
so I don't have to watch those commercials.
Well, that's your choice,
but there are many of us out there
who would prefer to save a little bit of money
and spend a little bit of time watching those commercials.
Okay. So if you are going to go down that road,
which streaming services are going to be best for you.
So I did two things, first of all,
I watched an ungodly amount of TV
so that I could come up with these
commercials numbers for you.
And I also did some online sleuthing just to make sure
that my numbers were matching up with
what the rest of the online community was seeing.
And yeah, I think I got pretty close.
So what we'll do is take a look at how many commercials
or how many minutes worth of commercials
you'll have to watch during one hour of programming.
The first thing we need to do
when we acknowledge streaming services
is talk about YouTube.
YouTube isn't just for watching
your handsome and humble correspondent.
It's also for watching movies and TV shows
just like any other streaming service.
You do have some of those available on YouTube.
So if you go and watch TV shows and movies on YouTube,
is it gonna act the same as other streaming services?
Well, no, not quite, it's still YouTube.
So the reason that we take YouTube
and kind of put it aside a little bit
is because YouTube has something
that no other streaming service does.
And that is skippable ads.
Now, when you're watching a TV show or a movie on YouTube,
you'll probably get fewer skippable ads than you would
on a video like this one, but they do still happen.
And that's going to cut down
your commercial time dramatically.
So with YouTube, I really only had to sit
through a couple of minutes of commercials
over one hour of show.
Now the last caveat here is that
I didn't do every single streaming service.
I grabbed, how many, I grabbed 10 of them
and used those as a stand-in for some others.
Now, some won't make the list at all, like Netflix,
because they don't have a commercial supportive plan.
So commercials are moot on that one, but the rest of these,
you either have a free service entirely
that's commercial supported.
And with the rest of these you've got
either a commercial tier or a premium non-commercial tier.
Now, once we take YouTube and set it aside,
then we're left with a bunch of other
premium or commercial supported services.
Things like Hulu or HBO, max, or Paramount plus,
where you can pay for an upper tier
where you don't have to watch commercials
or pay the lower fee, or sometimes no fee
and have it commercial supported.
So in that case with these kind of dual services,
these all kind of clumped up similarly.
So you can see, they go anywhere from about
three to six minutes with Hulu being on the low end
and paramount plus being on the upper end of that.
But they do clump up pretty neatly together.
Within these timeframes though,
the three to six minutes of commercials per hour
of television watched,
we do have one outlier and that is IMDB TV.
It fits very nicely, time-wise with the rest of these,
but it is different because it's not a dual tier service.
There is no paid tier for IMDB TV,
it's all commercial supported.
This is interesting because when you look at the other
non-dual tier services that I looked at,
you can see that it really bucks the trend.
With the other services I looked at,
Tubi, Plex and the Roku Channel,
I was served up way more commercials
than I was on those dual tier services.
Now these like IMDB TV are all single tier.
There is no premium service that you can subscribe to,
to get rid of commercials.
It's all commercial supported.
And they had far more commercials than I experienced
on the other dual tier services.
And they all averaged about six to eight minutes.
Now compare that to the three to six minutes
on the other services.
And yeah, you can see that you are going to watch
more commercials on those types of streaming channels.
So why is that?
Why is Hulu only serving up say three minutes of commercials
compared to seven or eight over on Tubi?
Well, it's because over on Hulu, you're still paying,
you're just paying a little bit less for your service.
So six bucks a month versus 11 bucks a month
for the premium version of Hulu.
Well, you're already paying,
so they have that revenue from you.
They don't need the additional revenue
from more commercials,
but if you go to the service where
it's all completely commercial supported,
they've gotta make up that revenue somehow.
So they're gonna serve up more commercials to you.
Now we can talk more about the nuances of these numbers
in the comments, but before we do that,
lemme just compare this really quickly
to what you would be getting if you hadn't cut the cord.
Okay, so if you stick with cable or satellite,
how many commercials are you gonna be watching?
Well, the number is high.
If you watch enough cable or network television
then you'll know that over an hour of programming,
you're gonna be watching a minimum of 16 minutes
of commercials.
These days, it's usually probably more like 18.
So over an hour of programming.
Yeah, any streaming service is going to be way,
way better than what you get on cable or network.
So it sounds like as cord cutters,
we should at least grateful for that.
But let me know what you think about this issue.
Hit the comments below and tell me
what your experience has been with commercials.
How many streaming services have you logged into
and had to sit through the same commercial
over and over again,
you know, for an hour long, you know?
Cause they only loaded what one commercial into the queue
that can get annoying.
There are other commercial issues to talk about.
So yeah, let me know what you think in the comments.
Thank you so much for watching everybody.
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Thanks for watching everybody.