On cable TV, shows have scheduled commercial breaks. The shows are written with commercial breaks in mind. If a movie airs on cable and doesn’t have built-in commercial breaks, somebody chooses good times for breaks.
However, on streaming services, like Tubi, that have ads, ad breaks can come at any time at random. A character could be speaking and interrupted by an ad midsentence.
I have no problem having to watch ads, that’s how we pay for free tv. But can’t streaming services have scheduled ad breaks like cable channels do? Isn’t there a way they could program it so the ad breaks come at specified times in the movie or episode? I think YouTube used to do that.
On a side note, the opposite problem is also a bit annoying. We have shows that were made for cable, with buit-in ad breaks, now airing on streaming services without ads. Without the ad break it just seems weird when a cliffhanger happens and then we get an establishing shot and return immediately to the same scene. There’s a needless break in the action because it was made with ad breaks in mind but now feels weird to watch without the ad break.
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They absolutely can address it, they just don’t. YouTube still offers that feature; creators can mark optional points in their videos that are good places to run ads. There is a frustratingly high percentage of creators (at least the ones I watch) who don’t take advantage of this, leaving YouTube to run ads mid-sentence. You’d think that people who are trying to get paid from ad revenue would take a few minutes to optimize their placement, but most do not.
