What’s another reason people are running from television to DVDs, the web, computer games and other entertainment mediums? Branded screen real estate. Check out this shot from today’s Super Bowl:
Three of the four corners feature permanent station identification logos (incidentally, will anybody forget they’re watching “Super Bowl XL”?). These logos are getting bigger, less transparent and animated. I recently noticed that the logo on Spike TV is sometimes in full colour, as opposed to being transparent.
Ironically, I think stations are waging a losing battle. As the number of channels (never mind the number of mediums) increases, watchers couldn’t care less whether they’re watching ABC, Spike TV or BBC 72. As far as I can tell, combine time-shifted television with smart recording and a 500-channel universe, and channel loyalty approaches zero. When was the last time you heard somebody say “oh, yeah, I saw this great show on NBC last night”?
I must be getting old and curmudgeonly, but I’ll happily wait until I can buy a series on DVD. Of course, for sports events, I’ve just got to put up with it.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I think part of this comes from the multi-channel universe. If you ARE still just flipping channels, you need an identifier there to tell you where they are. It’s been years since I could remember what each channel was (and those I do remember, such as KOMO/ABC being 4, KING/NBC being 5, and KVOS being 12, are all wrong now anyway).
And if you record something (and maybe post it to Google Video or YouTube or BitTorrent?), the network or channel wants to have evidence there of where you got it. The bigger and more obnoxious the logo, the more likely it is to survive the compression and sharing process too.
Not that I like it. Just trying to explain it.
The station identifiers are annoying, but far more insidious are the actual ads for other programs shown in the bottom corner (TBS does this *all* the time). They’re ridiculously obtrusive.
The ones that piss me off are the ones with sound. G4 TV was running one of those animated ads in the lower right corner for weeks. They were advertising the arrival of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The sound was that of the “doorbell” for the living quarters. Very confusing when you are working on the computer and watching TV at the same time. I kept thinking that I had new e-mail.
We watched the Super Bowl with an abicus on the table (between the bowls, the cans, the glasses and the plates) in front of us to count the frequency of the most offensive ads.
Worst offender? Global itself. They advertised for themselves 43 times that we counted. And it’s not like they were good or interesting or entertaining ads. No, they were crap crap crap ads for their other crap crap crap shows.
As a group we developed an active loathing for the precious faux-sincere smile of their news anchor, who, they promised, would provide clarity to our complicated world. Nice. Reductivist reporting and wire stories approved from the Asper living room. One big F-sharp all around.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice that the Seahawks got hosed on calls? At the risk of sounding overly conspiracy-aware, I think the major factors deciding the game were the calls of the officials.
I hate all that shit they put on the screen too. Once last year, maybe it was 2 years ago, I was watching the Sunday night game on ESPN HD. There was a ‘production problem’ at one point and they lost their truck for 20-30 minutes. Only one camera was available, and no on screen graphics. Because it was the same camera angle and no graphics, it felt like I was in a skybox at the game. The HD picture was truly stunning. All sports should be broadcast that way.
I’m getting in to this late, but I have all but quit watching television.
I can’t concentrate on the show for all the flash, crawling, creeping, spinning, circling graphics…now inclusing midget versions of the stars and horrid sound effects.
What moron decided that it is productive to totally blow a viewers concentration in the middle of a great movie or show? Isn’t the 38 minutes of commercial breaks an hour enough?
Pfffffffft!
What finally made me snap and log on to see what I could do about it was when I was watching a show with subtitles and couldn’t read them because a scrolling ad for a show that was coming on next covered it up. Aaarggh!