I have old DVDs of shows like Star Trek and Naked City which have aruntime of 51 minutes, New shows like Criminal Minds often have a runtime of 43 minutes.
I "have this pattern."
I recently went to see which episodes of Bones were available on Netflix and Hulu. I'll have to go back and check again to be sure, but it seemed to me that the earlier episodes were longer. The more current ones are in the low 40s.
That's nearly twenty minutes of crap out of an hour.
It wouldn't take much to convince me to move my primary viewing to Hulu/Netflix on Roku . . . except that Roku's Hulu (or is it Netflix) has started injecting
non-skip-able advertising into the episodes. That's all that keeps me using the DVR. If the DVR commercials become unskippable, then I'm not sure there will be any reason to continue with "live" TV at all.
I, too, have noticed this trend -- especially on "news" channels to do in-show promotion teasers telling you that "after the break" (and
which break is never specified) they're gonna tell you about that 80-car pile-up, or that gang home invasion, or the village that fell through the ice, or whatever. They'll spend ten minutes worth of air time telling you that they're gonna tell you something, and then the actual segment is three minutes long.
Yea, verily, I am fed up unto my eyeballs with that crap.