My guess it would be the local company doing it, since it seems to be localized to this one cable provider.

As for the audible tone, RTN the Retro Television Network seems to be doing it. Now if they could only get the local station that carries it in New York to air it 24/7 instead of 6 hours a day. Still 6 hours is better than the old all infomercal all the time format.

Why, I DO remember that tone from when CNN was a news channel! So, a very long time ago.

That half a second of enzyte commercial is very fixable too. Most likely its cutting off the last half a second of the previous commercial. They have a setting to move the commercial up .5 second and fix it all, but most companies are too lazy to fix it. Thats coming from someone who installs that equipment...

Equipment for this has gotten much better, but it's still all automated. If you see a consistent problem, call your cable company, something has gone wrong! Sometimes the system hiccups and starts ads late or early. Most of the time it's a human on the network side telling the tones when to go down the line.

I worked with a small cable co a few years back, and yea, we had the .5 second issue. problem was it was the incoming tones were off, not the local equipment!

On older equipment, it actually had to roll a tape, witch caused some delays if there was a tape issue not coming up to speed. 99% of everything now a days should be digital though!

@Tambar: Zing! You show 'em!

I remember when I was a teenager and our cable company used to have problems airing their commercials. I specifically remember they had an ad that was supposed to scare people out of stealing cable and it opened with a middle class woman sitting in a jail cell, looking very forlorn. Only problem was, the sound from the network commercial would play instead of the sound for the cable theft commercial so it went something like this:

Picture of woman behind bars looking very scared and alone with the voice-over "You never forget your first girl!" (St. Pauli girl beer). Strange that I still remember that and it's been over 25 years!

Just remember people used to do this manually. I remember watching a guy do it at my local station. Program goes to break and... fade up commercial.

This is why it was more common years ago to see "Please stand by" when a human being forgot to do something.

I have Charter cable, and for the last 3 years or so, a common phenomenon is for there to be a commercial break, then the last commercial of that break ends, but then, we're treated to the last 2 or 3 seconds of some other commercial ... then it's back to the show.

It's as though Charter's own commercial airings take a second or two less time to complete, than the ones they're superceding. But only by just that much. Very odd.

We haven't been able to discern a pattern ... e.g. whether it happens on some channels more than others, or some shows more than others. It's pretty common, though.

Once in a great while it works in the other direction ... at the start of a commercial break, we see a second or two of one commercial, only to have a different one start up, followed by the rest of the commercial break. But this is less common.

Years ago after upgrading to Dish Network I noticed hours of infomercials on Comcast while Dish had actual programing on the same channels.

Is it possible that the cartoon or tv show has the "magic tone" in it and is accidentally triggering the commercial? Unless the network filters their content to specifically exclude the "magic tone" then this is entirely feasible.

Oh THAT'S what that tone is. I've heard it before on other channels.

What about when the local station runs the break too long and I miss a little bit of "LOST?" That shit needs to STOP!

@twophrasebark: In high school, I was the cause of those "Please Stand By" cards. That was my first job, and I was terrible at it.

Isn't Enzyte paying for their commercial to air across the entire network (and not be superseded by local cable companies airing spots of their own)?

Oh, they can explain away why it's doing it, but are they making the effort to resolve the issue? Did they make any overture on if and when this problem will be resolved?

If some dummy is not setting the system clocks properly, then some retraining or a better time sync system would be in order.

Slightly o/t, but I remember the days before 1978 when there were only 5 minutes of commercials in a 30-minute show (during prime time). Maybe if they didn't have so many actual breaks we would see less of this problem? Just a thought, that's all.

We will now return to our regularly scheduled commercials, now with fewer minutes of actual show content.

@JRules: There was one recently with a commercial that started out with "Homeowners," but it would get cut off, so many commercial break started with a guy pointing at the camera and yelling "HOMO!"

Some jerk fixed it, though. Boo!

Odds are they have it set to trigger on cues for the wrong channel (ie, this is Nickelodeon but it's triggering on the CNN cues, for example).

These breaks are why you always heard the anchors on Fox News apologizing to guests as they cut them off that they have a 'hard break' coming up... I know at one point I was keeping track and they seemed to be at :18 and :48 after the hour.

@MedicallyNeedy: You may have been getting a west coast feed from Dish and an east coast feed from cable. One bad thing about living out west: the news networks are running repeats and a lot of networks go to infomercials at 9pm.

@PsiCop: It could come down to how much black is being left between the spots, both on the 'network' feed and what the cable company's server is playing out. It seems like our local cable company's inserts tend to be late more than early.

As funky as it looks, this would be much harder to pull of were it done manually, since in theory the reaction time of the machines should be more accurate assuming everything is set up correctly. The automation system I run for the cable channel I work on normally is accurate to just a few frames. And we run a GPS-based clock system that is accurate to a thousandth of a second and re-calibrates the timing of the whole system every hour.

Here's one I don't understand. Why does Verizon air ads for FiOS while I'm watching my FiOS tv? The only way you can see a commercial on FiOS is if you have FiOS cable. So why advertise to an audience you already have?

@GitEmSteveDave_IndustrialStrengthLasagna: To continue, why do I have to miss commercials that have actual production value to see stuff like this:

@GitEmSteveDave_IndustrialStrengthLasagna: Damn, not my day. Two failed posts.

The origin of the broadcast (someone in Master Control at Turner / Viacom / NBC-Universal / Disney / Discovery / etc) is still supposed to be aware of when the affiliate tones are firing, and is supposed to ensure that they're firing at the proper times. Then the affiliate airing the "local" commercials (Comcast / Cox / Time Warner / etc) -- as opposed to the nationwide commercials that air with the program -- is supposed to pick it up from there.

Cable broadcasting is EXTREMELY rigid. Broadcasting facilities reconcile programming not just down to the second, but down to the frame. Where things tend to break down is in the communication between Network A and Cable Company B.

@changed my name: ROFL!

@spanky: lol, actually chuckled at that

That must be the reason why sometimes you'll see a split second of a commercial (probably the national commercial) then a local commercial will appear like a second after that.

Having developed many of the automation systems used in broadcasting, there's a good chance the local systems aren't being programmed correctly with the proper stopset times or aren't using a synchronized clock. These basic mistakes can ruin even the best designed systems. ::sigh::

@changed my name:

I guess its true then, you never forget your first girl.

The Weather Channel is the exception. It uses cues that come from computers at cable headends (these computers also generate those lovely local forecasts).

LOL, I wonder if we took a powerful RF modulator on channel 3 or 4 and sent DTMF touchtones 622* if channel 3 would start playing commercials to everyone on the local cable network.

@guroth:

X2, like those stupid commercials that play touchtones when they're telling you what number to dial, the tones don't always match up with the actual number displayed on the screen, I also wonder if we could exploit this during a live broadcast with a many tone dialer from radioshack, if you can get a news reporter to give you the mic for just 5 seconds =)

@pmcpa4: What do you expect the Comcrap (or whoever) drones to do about it? The answer they'll most likely give you is to either check your cables or to make sure you paid your bill this month.

@nybiker: In their eyes, the less actual program content, the better (for them)

@GitEmSteveDave_IndustrialStrengthLasagna: Maybe if you're either in someone else's house (that has it) or a retailer, so you can yell out "OMG, this is SO COOL!!! I gotta call and sign up!!!!!"

@twophrasebark: They do still do it manually. Or at least, there has to be someone sitting there (at your local station.) They can get a machine to switch the break, but the machine has to have the show times programmed in it by someone. The networks don't send down tone to the affiliates.

@HogwartsAlum: That's because the traffic department (the department in charge of taking the ad sales from sales and programming the breaks during the day) either added too many spots to a break, or the network gave them the wrong times for a break.

Or someone ran the 2:00 break in the 1:45 break slot.

@gst214: The enzyte is probably filler. The network has to put something in incase some local market doesn't have anything sold or promo to air.

There's also another explanation for this. Having worked in media tracking, I have personally seen this happen.

A certain amount of cable ad space is "re-sold" at the local level. So instead of seeing an advertisement for Bayer Aspirin on the national feed, you get an ugly-looking ad for "Bob's Local Bait Shack".

Often these ads come in a split second or so late, after the national ad has started running.

The reason for this is because most national ads are "tracked" either digitally or via key-words and closed-captioning.

When you see a national ad for a split second that then switches to a local or regional ad, it's because the cable companies are 'double dipping'...selling the same commercial spot twice.

That first initial second of the appearance of the national ad is enough to make it appear to the tracking services that the 'national ad' actually ran, and can therefore be reported back to the advertiser.

"See, your ad ran at X o'clock, we have confirmation!" they will tell the advertiser.

When in fact, it did *not* run and was replaced at the local/regional level by a completely different ad.

Blah...blah...blah... This is interesting and all, but the question really should be: is it *REALLY* too much to ask that cable companies not mess up something this simple?

The system is all computerized, right? It should be a no-brainer, even for the local branches, to get right without annoying their customers.

So, what now? Everyone has to call their local cable company when they have this problem and tell the support drone to please pass on the following instructions on how to fix their Commercial-Tron-2000?

@Tambar: Damn.