Monday, February 15, 2010

Czech Television

It's Olympic time and I'm not able to watch like I normally would. First of all, there's the 9 hour time difference between Vancouver, Canada and the Czech Republic. And because of international copyright laws, etc., I can't watch U.S. coverage on NBC.com from Europe.

There's also the fact that everything on TV here is in Czech. I still haven't got the full low-down on Czech TV but here's a couple of things. Most of the shows are shown with very few, if any, commercials. It looks like the commercials are shown between shows.

The start times are just odd to me. Granted the times are all listed in military time but that's not the odd part. It's the air times. In the U.S., shows all start on the hour or the 1/2 hour. But not here. It's not uncommon for shows to begin at five or ten minutes past or even twenty minutes till.

I don't quite get the 18:49 start time. Why does a show start at 6:49 PM?

My Czech teacher wants me to start watching more Czech TV to improve my listening skills. Maybe it will also help me understand why some programs have such unusual air times.

3 comments:

  1. I'm surprised your Czech teacher wants you to start at the "TV Level." Aren't there Czech kid's audiotapes? It would be slower yet still complex enough to challenge you.

    Still trying to adjust to the fantasy that there could be no commercials during shows. What a wonderful concept!

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  2. TV channels governed by public law (ČT1, ČT2, ČT4 and ČT24) don't have commercials during shows, other commercial channels do have them. And sometimes the blocks of commercials are SO long that even one forgets what he/she was actually watching before :-))

    sarka

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  3. CT is a state television therefore it has less commercials than the other TVs. The show which starts at 18:49 is called 25 years ago - the totalitarian propaganda day by day:) It just fills the space in between more interesting shows because CT2 has nearly no commercials to fill the space. But in fact I have never seen this kind of start before:)

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