PBS Sprout Channel

[amcal]

What the heck is up with the PBS Sprout Channel?

Their commercials are so inappropriate for a children's network - they have advertising for that Cindy Crawford skin care line talking about how you should fight lines and aging. They have a commercial for a depression medication. Life and health insurance commercials etc...

Why in the world are they having commercials dealing with adult issues on a children's network? and a PBS network to boot?

[lolar2]

I think the commercials are supposed to be over the children's heads so that they don't make the children whine for more stuff. That way they can still pay the bills, but they don't contribute so much to child consumerism (adult consumerism, yes-- I guess they consider it a compromise).

[Lolagirl]

This is one of the main reasons we no longer watch Sprout any longer in our house. I was getting really tired of my kids asking me about Chuck E Cheese and what it means to refinance (a mortgage) so we now tune in to Noggin pretty much exclusively these days. I agree it's really weird that they have commercials geared towards adults, frankly I think it's crazy that they have commercials at all when Sprout is usually not just basic cable for most subscribers.

At this point, we prefer the Noggin shows anyway (with the exception of Kipper and Thomas, which we watch On Demand instead) so it's really not that big of a deal.

[lolar2]

We have a DVR so we can ff through the commercials, mostly.

[funkymamajoy]

The commercials seemed to be aimed at moms. I'm just happy not to hear about how DS wants that toy or that movie at every commercial break.

I do like how the shows are in 15 min increments.

[muttix2]

I love Sprout. Commercials are commercials though. I mean you basically have two choices, have commercials geared towards kids or adults. I honestly prefer the adult commercials (as long as they aren't "adult") because they aren't trying to pimp out the new toy. The commercials are sexual (not that I've seen) and that's a biggie for me. I'll deal with having my kids see a banking commercial over the new Bakugan/Barbie/etc.

That said, we have dvr as well and I try to record shows for them to watch so that I can fast forward through the commercials.

[nolansmummy]

I too prefer them to the kids commercials for crappy toys, but i find we mostly watch noggin or on demand. That way i don't have to hear "i want xyz, that i saw on tv" all day long.

[Attila the Honey]

I also much prefer the boring adult commercials to the commercials for gogurt and sugary cereals and crappy toys.

I even prefer the crappy toys to the food commercials aimed at kids.

[_betsy_]

We watch the regular PBS stations here (I get 3, two regular PBS stations out of different cities that show children's progrmming in the morning and evening, and one that's HD and all children's programing 24/7) that show no commercials exceot for the 5 second sponsorship ads.