Was down with fever and flu yesterday thus, on MC. Feel abit better today and I hope I'll recover in time for Christmas! Had a little office Christmas gathering at Erics' and it's good to see your colleagues from different circles out of the office. We exchanged gifts and I got a Real Madrid T with Bekhams' 23 behind. Cool! :)

Anyways, back to the topic. Recently, I have noticed a significant increase in airtime for advertisements for pay-TV, namely ASTRO and TGV cinemas. For ASTRO, slotting in tonnes of ads for pay-RV are both unfair and unreasonable for subscribers as we actually do pay for the programs. However, @$$TRO made us sit through long-winded comercials similar to those found on free-TV and not only that, the frequency of the ad time has also been increased. From my research, @$$TRO earned a total of USD120 Million in 2002 and USD330 Million in 2003 from advertising! That's a whopping 175% increase! Oh well, that's what you get for being the sole pay-TV provider out there. Hopefully, we'll see MiTV soon. I just love competitions!

As for the cinemas, I've noticed that ad time has been increased to 20 mins instead of 10 mins. I've noticed this from my outing to watch the Incredibles and Ocean's 12. You can feel people squirming in their seats and some ppl actually finnished their popcorn before the start of the movie. I dunno bout GSC but I've noticed the increased in ad time for TGV. (I was actually 15 mins late for the Incredibles and was surprised that I still made in for the ads!) I would suggest the movie operators to reduce the ad time. We pay to watch a movie and not 20 mins worth of ads! 20 mins is like 16% of the average movie time! Sometimes I understand why ppl would rather watch 'cheap' DVDs than pay for seats in the cinema.