I explained that in that same thread - it’s for branding, station identification and to watermark content so it doesn’t get reshared without it.

There are people at every affiliate who’s job it is to determine what to program on air. If those overnight shows didn’t do what they needed to do, they’d be pulled.

I can’t even imagine the staffing nightmare that would be, not to mention the ratings mess it would cause. TV stations across the country have been downsizing for decades. That’s why most reporters are also their own photographers these days (called MMJs…multi-media journalists). That’s just one example and there are a lot more. Not to mention the fact that there is not enough local content in 99% of the markets to make 24 -hour local news profitable.

We already have 2-3 hours of local news here in the afternoon/evening. Do we really need another 90 minutes of "local" news, made up of endless teases and canned national stories of questionable validity.

It's either that or more Big Bang Theory reruns.

I guess streaming is killing scheduled non-live event television faster than expected.

This doesn't matter anymore. The people where this ^ is of great importance, will have died from natural causes or be inflicted with dementia / alzheimer over the next decade or two.

Excluding the case of tv/entertainment/popculture historians, it is of no importance any longer when there is no living memory of the 10pm prime time heydays (whether due to death or the inability to remember anything).

There is NBC News Now and CBS and ABC have their own streaming channels where all they show is news.

Changing times, indeed. I also believe another factor is playing into this - supposedly 10 PM is the biggest viewership for most streaming services aimed at adults.

"Explained" with ZERO proof of it having the desired effect or evidence of any effect whatsoever, as usual. Truth is most people just don't notice them, but it's destroyed the credibility of everyone in the business.

Do you a have precise definition of "credibility" in this context ?

I think we're getting a little off base on the point of this news. NBC is considering....only considering cutting the 10pm hour to save money. Like I said earlier in the thread, linear TV ratings are way down, which affects ad money to pay for the programming. But, that can be mainly attributed to us developing an on demand/time shift culture to watching content over the last 10-15 years due to DVRs and later online viewing/streaming services. Chicago PD can air their newest episode on Wednesday at 10pm, but if people aren't watching it until days, weeks, months later, that doesn't help the network and help keep the show on the air. And greenlighting a 13-22 episode season of network TV is not cheap. Programming is only getting more and more expensive as the years go by. NBC, the network, still survives on ad revenue and in some cases re-transmission fees.

Do you have a link to any recent articles about nielsen ratings which asserts that the 10PM slot is very popular for streaming services ?

Or is this just personal speculation / supposition on your part ?

Do you actually think that TV networks and local stations just DO things without following up to see if they work or not? Like it's just to piss you off?

I'm not saying everything is a perfect decision but if it wasn't effective to have the bug on-screen, then they wouldn't do it. It's one extra thing that needs to be implemented, checked, updated, etc. and it's not for funsies. And if you think a logo "destroys the credibility" of everyone in that business, you are simply proving you have absolutely no idea how that business works.

You seem to be such an expert on it, quit beating around the bush and tell us what good it’s been doing them. Some data on it has got to exist somewhere, even if it’s being kept top secret.

Meanwhile there’s plenty of data now that TV viewing is way down, I don’t think this annoyance has been helping matters any.

Ironic how Alan Smithee has not defined what "credibility" means in this context.

It’s not like they publish studies. But logically I can see that watermarking your content is a good thing when it gets shared all over the internet. And again, you don’t do something like this without some benefit. Even flipping from channel to channel, the viewer can quickly see what station they are on. That’s a good thing for everyone.

Some TV viewing is down and some is up. With the plethora of options out there, it’s more important than ever to make sure viewers know where what they are watching is coming from. The show I work for has had a bug for 15 years and I’ve never heard one complaint about it (and viewers complain about everything) AND our ratings are higher than ever.

Go ahead and cut the hours. I doubt anyone would notice with shuffling show times and dates all the time. People will just think it is that.

Probably .001% of people who watch TVs are as offended as you about the stupid network bugs.

Advertising and lack of interesting content are what made me start building my library of physical media. Go ahead and cut an hour, I don't care, I don't even watch your stupid TV anymore anyway.

Likely that's the case nowadays. When they first started there were complaints about them though, but even then you never heard many words from the people responsible explaining why they were there. When NBC started, there was a long thread on the rec.arts.tv newsgroup which I read often at the time titled "Stop the NBC Logo"- I would link to it but it doesn't seem to be easily findable now. Some people were outraged, but of course there were some who said "Doesn't bother ME." I do remember someone said "If they get away with this, all the other networks will follow suit" and that's exactly what happened- though for the most part nobody has talked about them, almost like they have been threatened with something really bad if they do. They've become the elephant in the room. It was ironic that it happened right at the start of HD also (NBC even had "HD" next to their peacock logo for a while). I'd been waiting for HD a long time but didn't see any point to it if they were going to intentionally deface the picture.

There's definitely been people who like to ridicule those who complain about bugs also- there was one person on that Usenet group who I think worked in the industry who would post about them a lot (his name was "LAGuy", and other users would just crap on him. Someone flat out told him to just stop complaining and he replied "I will complain about them as long as they're on my screen."

Fair enough- to me, credibility means should I respect your opinion or not, and should I consider what you say as fact. I've studied the history of TV going back to the beginning, there are people in the early years who did a lot of great things. NBC as a company was a huge innovator. They started color TV in the mid-50s long before color TVs were affordable. They were the first network with stereo in the mid-80s, which not many people cared about (and many today still don't) but as an audiophile I was thrilled; audio on TV wasn't much of a priority before that. Networks had a sense of SHOWMANSHIP also that's completely gone now. Commercial breaks were always a necessary evil, but they'd at least try to place them tastefully during shows. If a segment ended with a big emotional moment, there's be a good few seconds of silence (often with a title card) before the first commercial kicked in. This week I digitized an off-air recording of "Shogun" aired on NBC in 1980; that was a huge EVENT (which cost a ton of money to produce) and was treated as such. Sure there were commercials, but the first one didn't even appear until 25 minutes. That would be unheard of today. Point is, the people who ran NBC then actually CARED about how their shows were presented. Today, obviously the most innovative thing they can think of is to drop an hour per night- a few years ago I heard they were already considering dropping Saturdays.

So you admit you have no real proof of whether this has done any good overall (and specifically to NBC, which this thread is about.) They publish studies of lots of things, but there's been just about nothing about logos. And as I said in the other thread it's NOT about having content "shared all over the internet", that wasn't even possible in 1996 which was when NBC started this. And logically I can see that it looks terrible.

Quote:

Even flipping from channel to channel, the viewer can quickly see what station they are on. That’s a good thing for everyone.

How is knowing what station you are on more important than being able to see and enjoy the show? By that same logic, radio stations should loop IDs constantly over the music so that you'll always know what station you're listening to, and that's always been a higher priority there than it has been on TV. Besides that, all digital tuners will display the name of the station and the show that's on when changing channels, even if you land on a commercial. Digital TV also should have included a graphics signal similar to what blu-rays have, so that they could overlay all the graphics they wanted but the user could also turn them on and off.

You likely won't say what show that is. It sounds like a news/talk show which is entirely different than an emotional, dramatic series or something with visual impact. Also is it on broadcast or cable? Cable has lost a lot of subscribers and for good reason, but even when it was on top it seemed most viewers would tolerate anything. They'd complain about it maybe, but they wouldn't stop watching or subscribing. (I'd given up on cable by the early 90s for plenty of reasons, but of course you'll say I'm the exception.) It's one thing if the producers of an individual show want to load up the screen with text and graphics- it's another when the head of a network decrees that EVERY show on that network must do the same.



And why did people buy DVRs? Because there were too many COMMERCIALS and those let you easily skip them. I know shows are getting more expensive to produce but it's simply not realistic to expect viewers to sit through 20 minutes of them per hour, with or without clutter on the screen during the show itself. I don't have a good answer as to how to solve that, but if I ran a network I would be doing SOMETHING, ANYTHING to get people to watch shows live and not DVR them. (I don't have a DVR myself, so all they'd have to do in my case is give me a reason to tune in, period.) And if streaming is taking viewers away from the broadcasts, why allow the show on that in the first place? It used to be if you missed the initial airing, that was it until it was rerun in the off-season so you made damn well sure you were watching if you cared at all about it. Streaming probably gives scripted shows a bigger audience overall, but if broadcast networks and stations still depend on those to survive then they need to either give viewers a reason to watch them that way, or find some other way to innovate, the way radio shifted to music after TV took away the comedy and drama shows (yes, in the old days there were actual SHOWS on the radio, with no picture- you had to just imagine what was going on.)

In any event, giving up an hour of prime time is clearly admitting defeat. In the historical sense it's sad, but the way it's been the past 20+ years I won't miss it.

Aw, does this mean we won't have two interminable Dateline hours anymore? Two hours of a white-haired cadaver doing his best film-noir-narrator audition; or a fat, sarcastic guy with severe vocal fry; or Barney Rubble. Damn, I'd sure miss not watching it.

Google Netflix peak hours or whatever. 9-11 PM is their peak bandwidth. It's not hard figuring out total consumption for streaming video since they make up such a huge percentage of all Internet traffic, which ISPs constantly monitor.

About more time for local news.

The NBC station here in Austin also runs the CW channel. At 9 central, they do a one hour newscast on the CW. They do the weather forecast like 4 times, and in the second half hour they repeat stories from the first half hour. Then at 10 central, they do their 35 minute newscast on NBC, with the exact same people and the exact same coverage.

And this is all after having local newscasts on the NBC channel from 4:00 - 5:30, and then another half hour at 6:00.

Whatever you have heard, Austin is NOT that interesting.

Same here In the Seattle area, the NBC station plays news all night on another channel they control repeating the same stories all night. This has zero benefit in our market when they will just put the same news on again for another hour..

Most viewers don’t watch multiple local newscasts. Creating completely different content for each one is a waste of time.

And the weather is prominent because it is easily the number 1 thing local viewers tune in for.

We have a channel here that has a ton of news broadcasts, and they're pretty much all the same besides breaking news (or a car chase, if there's a car chase going on forget the rest of the news because you're not seeing it): you see the exact same stories over and over again, though the poor reporter has to stay at the location where something happened at 10 in the morning giving the same spiel with minor variations.

It actually strikes me as super inefficient, especially the weather. I'm kind of surprised more stations especially sister stations don't just share a weather person.

But as I posted before, if that hour is going to be dedicated to news, I am certain the NBC News division could put together something much more useful to viewers and society than turning the time over to locals so they can repeat the same news over and over.

This bandwidth consumption isn't the issue. The issue is whether the time periods of peak consumption of Netflix in each time zone, is consistent (or inconsistent) with the 9-11 PM window.

From googling, the only obvious articles popping up which asserts a particular peak time period window for netflix, were some articles dating back to 2010 or 2011.

https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/tech/...dwith-mashable
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home...e-u-s-traffic/


It takes some more googling to find the original source studies, from a company named Sandvine. More recent sandvine reports don't mention the daily/hourly time periods as much.