The Lemon Fool

Because I am deaf I only ever watch recorded TV so that I can rewind the scene and the subtitles. Compared with a year or so ago it seems that breaks have changed from a fairly common 4 mins to generally shorter times - some as short as 20 secs or so.
I had supposed that this was because advert budgets had been cut back due to Covid repercussions but am now wondering if advertisers are taking the view that TV adverts no longer give the hoped for return.
The main exception to this seems to be the BBC who spend a considerable amount of time talking about what they are going to talk about in between their repeated 'signature clips'.
That time being what they are so terribly short of when someone has something interesting to say

What? I thought.

But then I re-read your post and wonder if what you mean is that you are watching streamed programmes rather than recorded TV. If you are recording terestrially broadcast commercial TV then you will be seeing a lot more than 20 secs per commercial break.

But if you're watching streamed shows then I'm guessing that the lenght of the breaks is dictated by how many commercials they can sell for those particular shows/slots. That's the reason many All 4 foreighn language shows have very short breaks, sometimes only for the sponsors.

But, of course, I could be wrong.

I've noticed that as well. Until recently, 8 quick presses on the Humax would skip the adverts perfectly. Now quite often it's 8 forward then 6 or 7 backwards presses to find the programme restart. This happens on terrestrial channels, such as MotoGP on ITV4 etc. I suspect that TV is losing ad revenue to social media and don't have the space to fill.