doesn't surprise me ... hour long shows these days contain 40min of actual show ... half hour shows regularly clock in now at 20 minutes (if not less)

Even Discovery channel shows put in a short 1-2 minute "clip" around the 50 minute mark just to insert another block of commercials before the end. Luckily my DVR can skip right through those segments without any real loss.

I imagine Paul also has no cell phone with a timer/stopwatch function... because that would be too mainstream.

What? Back in the days when local TV stations showed syndicated off-network reruns, they'd cut out little bits and pieces, and even cut the credits short to squeeze in a commercial or two. Movies? Hacked to pieces. The commercial radio station where I worked in college played 45s at 47.5 rpm. Nothing new here.

@1-3: Yes, but what about what this says about the plight of the working class and the slave labor at Amazon and about American productivity and the privileged people with their fancy Interwebs machines that let them stream Seinfeld rather than be subjected to the whims of their overlords at TBS...

Or whatever absurd point Constant was reaching for with this post...

That's a neat trick, @4 - that's a neat trick, @4 - inventing a point for Constant then calling it absurd.

the point is that Venal is America's middle name, and technology only enables that venality.

This is a real thing. They even tell you at the start of the show sometimes: its called time compression. http://everything2.com/title/time+compre…

They definitely run sped-up episodes. I've seen them. Jerry's voice is feminine. He becomes a real high-talker! And the impeccable comic timing is wiped out. They're hard to watch, honestly.

This definitely is not a hoax and this kind of thing has been going on for years. I don't know why it's news all of the sudden.

Years ago a local network used to show syndicated episodes of Cheers in which they'd straight up cut the punchlines of jokes off to make room for more ads.

Given what I've heard and seen of cable television channels, the person trying to figure out the timing isn't a "stuffed suit in middle management," it's probably someone who'd rather be working on real film or television projects working their day job while being harried by a stuffed polo in middle management who in turn was tasked by a persona-non-grata executive

...and the department doing the speed-ups is too behind schedule and low-budget to actually field test anything that banal beyond just letting it run.

plenty of radio stations did this back when radio was competitive. if you played any song 2.5-4% faster (adjusting for key), you'd appear to be "peppier" than your competition, plus you could cram in more ads.

i'm not positive, but i'm pretty sure this started in the mid-70's. there's a good reason that the SL-1200 has a +/- 8% pitch adjustment. it's not just for the disco-beatmixers of the day, it was because broadcast utilized it.