The Handmaid’s Tale finally landed in Australia last Thursday, a deeply unreasonable two months after its US debut. With the much anticipated series made available in its entirety on SBS On Demand, it seemed like everyone on social media had spent the weekend binge-viewing it.
Perhaps many of them are now thinking they’d have been better off acquiring the show by more dubious means. Across social media they cried out in horror, one after another, as each climactic moment in the violent, dystopian drama was interrupted by ads.
Whoever inserted the ads into Handmaiden's Tale on @SBS is a literal monster. Every single ad is breaking any kind of tension built up.
— Julie Bee (@Ragesplosion) July 9, 2017
According to one acquaintance, who watched through her TV, key scenes were cut off mid-sentence with ads for the Tour De France, before the service abruptly requested she sign in to her account again.
Another, watching on her laptop, said she was forced to sit through Ita Buttrose’s oddly Gileadean beauty tips – three times over in the same ad break. As one colleague said: “You’d go from violence to tacos.”
The really cool thing about watching The Handmaid's Tale legally on SBS is the ads that pop up literally mid-sentence. Incredible platform
— Alex Bruce-Smith (@alexbrucesmith) July 9, 2017
My experience streaming The Young Pope through my Smart TV a couple of months ago was similarly frustrating. Not only did the ads inexplicably cut in on some of the most dramatic moments, but they often seemed to prompt a complete drop out of the service, frozen screen and all. The only apparent remedy was switching the TV off entirely, which involved subsequently navigating back through the full menu to find the requisite episode, and fast-forwarding to where I left off. Seriously, this is a world in which I can make the show magically appear by mashing my fingers against a glass widget, but a professional broadcaster can’t appropriately schedule an ad?
So, what gives? TV streaming is the norm now, with subscription services Netflix and Stan dominating the local market. The free-to-air stations have put in the hard yards to catch up, with ABC iView leading the pack with accessible content that mostly plays without a hitch. SBS itself has a wealth of incredible local and international content – the On Demand film collection, for example, is excellent.
We are on episode 3, and it's really confusing. I thought it was a drama, but it is more just a recurring ad for LG TV's every. 7. Minutes.
— Marcus Roberts (@mrmarcusroberts) July 6, 2017
But unlike the ABC, SBS is only partly funded by the government and makes up a significant proportion of its operating budget from advertising. Ads have been appearing in-show during regular programming for about a decade now. These are usually scheduled with at least some consideration of the fact that people are engaged in the dramatic action of a narrative; the ads are inserted between scenes to allow for denouement, of a kind, to occur before the jingles start blaring.
But ads in streaming seem to be a different beast – at least on the face of it. Guardian Australia understands that ads on SBS On Demand are not automated – but how precisely they are cued is unclear.
Kickstarter to dack whoever's responsible for SBS On Demand's ad system
— Chris Woods (@tophermwoods) July 4, 2017
Nobody wants ads, but if we must suffer through them on a streaming service, is it too much to ask that providers find a seamless way of integrating them?
A spokesperson for SBS said they are “currently working through the issues raised to ensure that we’re delivering a great platform experience”.
Of course, it’s not just SBS that is yet to solve this problem. Hulu in the US, who commissioned and first screened The Handmaid’s Tale, and still has ads despite being a subscription service, garnered some familiar-sounding complaints when it streamed the same show:
did anyone @hulu even watch this lol? every single episode it's heartbreaking absuse + cut to black and a fuckin bounty commercial lmao
— Andrew Nissen (@constantlydumb) May 6, 2017
Hey @hulu - can't help but notice that the ONLY ads we see during HandMaid's Tale are for IUD's and home pregnancy tests #WTF
— FuzzQueen (@Fuzzqueen) May 24, 2017
And while moving house last year, I kept up with my favourite mind-numbingly stupid guilty pleasure, The Bachelor, using Ten’s catch-up service, TenPlay, on my laptop. The videos wouldn’t even run with an ad blocker in place, and when I turned it off I was blasted with the same ad for a particular brand of futuristic hair dryer (on repeat, naturally) every 15 or so minutes, with no opportunity to fast-forward, and subsequently buggy playback.
Um I am streaming The Handmaids Tale on SBS On Demand and every random ad is for baby powder 👀
— Peter Taggart (@petertaggart) July 9, 2017
This is arguably less annoying than the tickers, overlays and other kinds of intrusive advertising that commercial TV often dreams up. During local screening of the US drama, Homeland, earlier this year, Ten was reportedly splashing up overlay ads for I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! that were so large and intrusive viewers could hardly see the screen – over the top of major plot twists to boot.
Every second counts when it comes to making money, but how many people are switching off because of it? Is TV killing TV?
It's fairly jarring watching the #HandmaidensTale and all of a sudden @CurtisStone appears in a @Coles ad. Not once, but three times @SBS
— Sarah Homewood (@sarahkhomewood) July 9, 2017
When it comes to SBS, I rather think this just adds more fuel to the argument for increased funding – instead of, say, paving the way for the broadcasting service to increase its number of ads, which is what the government is currently trying to do. Reduce the reliance on advertising entirely, and give us back our drama.
