Commercial breaks on ITV2

surprisingly, itv2 has been having some better christmas telly than itv1, one thing i've noticed which is strange is the way commercial breaks are inserted into films - it seems to be 'unclean'. are they just put in automatically or does somebody find a convenient break point (such as scene change) and it breaks then ? they seem to happen totally randomly.

It's been like that on all of the ITV digital channels for a long time, and it happens on normal TV programmes too (like UFO on ITV4). Very unprofessional.

Does it simply crash to an advert mid-scene then?

Just as the scene's about to end. If you haven't seen the film before, you'd think it was mid-scene.

Previously ITV2 and co would cut to a holding card, typically a still from the movie in question so you'd know it was a break.

These days they just cut straight to a sponsor bumper if present, or a one second ITV2 breakbumper. Therefore if you're not paying attention you'd be caught off guard watching About A Boy and thinking "I didn't see this scene in the cinema, since when did this scene with Hovis come from?".

Mind you the way we're going on I wouldn't be surprised if we do end up crashing to adverts at camera cuts with the only clue being the absence of the DOG.

Isn't alot of this due to many digital channels having commercial breaks at similar times during any hour? They seem to stick roughly to this regardless of what's happening in a film, the plot of which obviously doesn't fit into the standard 30 or 60 minute pattern.

If you decide to go channel surfing during commercial breaks you will normally find all the popular channels doing them at the same time, especially within the same 'family' (VMTV, UKTV, Sky1/2/3, ITV, Discovery). Basically, you can't escape the adverts, unless you PVR absolutely everything - and I haven't managed 100% success with that strategy, yet

ITV1 always cuts bits out of the film as well.