Well cable networks seem to be at it again. Cord Cutters News is hearing from disgruntled cable subscribers that some networks are only airing 18 minutes worth of shows during a 30-minute episode block. We did some digging to confirm this and found a post on Reddit also saying they are finding episodes running just 18 minutes.
This is not the first time something like this happened. A few months ago TBS was caught speeding up episodes of Signified to cram in more commercials. In the 1980s and early 1990s 30-minute TV shows had 24 minutes of programing with just 6 minutes of commercials. Now the average for a new episode is just 21-22 minutes. It is not unheard of to take a few minutes from older shows like the Simpsons in reruns but cutting it back to 18 minutes is a major cut back.
The good news for cord cutters is you can still watch your favorite shows as they originally aired without commercials. Even better news is at an average of 24 minutes of ads per one hour of TV during reruns Cord Cutters will save over 1,000 hours of time by not watching commercials every year. (According to NY Daily News Americans watch on average 5 hours of TV every day.)
So if you still have a friend thinking about cutting cable tell them about how they could save 1,000 hours every year just by watching their favorite show on Netflix or buying it on Amazon or iTunes.