craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

For someone who's been in Europe for the past three years it is, anyway. I was all enthused about being able to watch an NFL game when I was back in the States last weekend, and so I tuned in to the Jets-Bills game on Sunday... and saw a truck commercial. Then another. Then another. Then there was a play. Then a truck commercial. Then another play. Then a truck commercial.

It didn't help that I tuned in right before the two minute warning and before the end of the half there was a turnover and a timeout, but still: Back in the day I know there were not this many commercials, and definitely not for a regular season game. I know this because I actually stopped watching the NBA like seven years ago because I was so disgusted by how many commercials they had (the whole "last minute of a playoff game takes 45 minutes" thing—which is especially disgusting in basketball since giving the players so much rest time changes the physical nature of the sport).

Tom explained that this was because sports were one of the few things people still watched live, so they put in as many commercials as possible. But man, talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs! Why can't they just charge ten times as much for 1/10th the commercials?! For the second half we ended up queuing up on the DVR to be able to make the game watchable. As Tom manipulated the many controls required to make the game play at something resembling the rate it would've gone on at in pre-commercial timeout days, I thought of how I was using Madden NFL '07 on the Wii to get my American football fix while in France, and realised that watching the real thing took almost as much interaction as the video game.

I may always prefer baseball and American football to soccer and rugby, but in being able to watch the entire game with no commercials except at halftime, Europe definitely has the advantage.