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Obnoxious new trend of a commercial blurb in the form of a "pop-up" style graphic during a show. Suffers from a trend of being large, staying on the screen too long, occasionally having sound and generally ruining your viewing experience, particularly by covering up the lower one-tenth (or more!) of the screen, making it impossible to read things like labels to know who's talking, or subtitles. Even worse are the occasional ones that are actually accompanied by audio, including, in more than one case, loud explosion sounds.
Commonly called "bugs" by broadcasters, especially the small, semitransparent logos that appear in the lower right corner of the screen more or less continuously (in this case, it's usually to ID a network). Less commonly called "screen boogers" by annoyed viewers.
These ads are typically not for products, but for the network's programming. Often they advertise what show is on next or later that day on the same channel. These can be especially jarring if the later show "clashes" with the current show, such as an ad for The Bachelor during Lost.
A particularly egregious trend is a commercial popup indicating what show you are watching and what network you are watching it on.
A similar trend is to start airing commercials during the credits of a show or movie by smashing the credits to one half of the screen and commercials on the other. The credits are usually sped up and muted in favor of the shocking revelation coming on later tonight.
Have been known to ruin many a piece of potential Fan Vid footage...
...which is part of the point. Beyond just reclaiming some of the valuable advertising time they had previously wasted on actual show, these popups serve several other purposes linked to the rise of digital video recorders:
- They can not be easily skipped like normal commercials
- They make DVD releases more desirable than off-air recordings
- They "brand" the video feed, making bootleg copies easier to identify.
However, it is nigh-well unforgivable when a blocked subtitle is involved.
Examples:
- During the Sci-Fi Channel run of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a pop-up of the Sci-Fi Channel logo would appear in the bottom-right corner of the screen, often obscuring Crow T. Robot during the theater scenes. This was so annoying that viewers successfully petitioned Sci-Fi to move their logo to the other side of the screen.
- On G4's X-Play, bugs became so common and annoying (and occasionally covered up important words/numbers etc. at the corner of the screen), that in one game review, they inserted a number of bugs all over the screen at random intervals that obscured it completely. G4 no longer puts bugs on during the show.
- At the height of their ill-advised, childish, gimmicky idiocy, G4 found it best to include long, scrolling windows with moronic questions at the bottom of the screen that people online could prattle on about during the show. However, G4 neglected to change the framing of the TV show, so inevitably the window would COVER THE GAME RATINGS, as well as other things more desirable than a glorified chart room.
- Game Network, later in its run, had a similar 'feature' where viewers could send text messages to the screen (at about 50p a time) - this was initially performed by zooming out and quarter-screening the programme and putting the texts in some other part of the screen. At one point, the chat's background would reflect the programme in question- usually a change of colourscheme to match the studio or something. However, in each background, the programme window would be in a different part of the screen, and that would have its effect on the psotion of the chat- on the bottom quarter of the screen on one show, down the right half on the next. Also, the transition from one background to the other would be a jerky fade to the channel logo and back. And it would invariably be about two minutes late for the start of the show.
- Eventually the channel got through this phase and stuck to one layout. Initially a Bloomberg-like L shape where the picture made up two-thirds, this later became an overlay for the bottom third of the screen with otherwise full screen video, obsuring any programme captions.
- Once this got back to the channel's show producers, they raised the position of their captions to above the texts. However, GN broadcasted all over Europe, and the texts were only shown in the UK. So now while the UK had readable captions, people watching in Italy, where the channel was broadcast from, were left scratching their heads wondering why the name of the game they were seeing was halfway up the screen.
- Parodied in an episode of Drawn Together: Ling-Ling (who speaks in pseudo-Japanese and can only be understood through subtitles), is trying to convince the other housemates to help him, when suddenly a bug for The Daily Show appears, obscuring everything he's saying. Another character exclaims "Ling-Ling's right! I love the Daily Show!"
- The Simpsons also once had Homer eating a Joe Millionaire pop-up. Similarly, another Couch Gag had the Fox logo pop up on the screen, with the entire family rushing over to stomp on it (back when logo bugs were the only commercial pop ups around). The creators of The Simpsons currently have a deal with Fox, wherein they will not put up real advertisements like this on during their show. They're spectacularly successful. They can do that.
- Also parodied in The Simpsons Movie, where a pop-up ad appears, stating "Yes, we even have these in movies now". (Actually, it's a newsbar, but still...)
- Marge went further at the start of the 2007 Treehouse of Horror: with so many ads, she gets angry ("Can't people just watch the show they're watching?") and gets rid of the promos in various ways, such as vacuuming football players with a minivac, sticking House in a microwave and putting the rest in a meatloaf. Wherein they wriggle.
- Sci Fi channel had a particularly horrible bug for their "Trek 2.0" version of Star Trek The Original Series, which included the Star Trek The Next Generation door chime. Slightly annoying, until you realize they also play Next Generation reruns! Yes, they had a pop-up ad (for another show) which included a sound that was taken from the show that was actually playing.
- Sci Fi loves running half-screen "Ghost Hunter" popups in the middle of Eureka.
- The UK arm of the station were running some kind of semi-market-research survey by telephone over about a week sometime in the 90's- this was advertised by wanging a massive picture of a head with a question mark in it over the right-hand third of the screen and a question with a phone number to dial on the other two thirds. Right in the middle. For ages.
- Ads for the new TBS original comedy (yes, those exist now) The Bill Engvall Show have stumbled upon a way to intrude even more: Bill Engvall himself pops up and pauses the show you're watching to talk about his show. Which basically defeats the entire purpose of using pop-ups as opposed to actual commercials, as it basically creates an incredibly short commercial break at a random moment of the show.
- To add insult to injury (Namely, yours when you put your fist through the screen), the commercial begins with Bill Engvall telling you how cool it is that he can pause the show you are watching. And by "cool", we mean "bend over".
- It's not just television that has done this, either. Japanese video site NicoNico Douga actually started adding interstitial ads smack-dab in the middle of the video you happen to be watching, with no way to skip ahead or pause at all. When you tried to watch a music video, you got hit with a two-minute ad for Penguin Musume Heart out of nowhere. (It's rather random, though, so it's not clear whether or not they've stopped this practice.)
- Children's networks have taken up the more egregious practice of shrinking the main picture and filling the resulting space with promos.
- To plug Jimmy Neutron, Nickelodeon had these with Jimmy coming up and doing A FRICKING SHORT as one of these bugs. That's right. They diverted the attention from the show to this kids doing experiments anywhere on the screen at any time! He did stuff like modifying the original bug at first, it grew worse. During an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, the kid came in, hit a button, and the whole episode was replaced by a puppet show version of itself. That's right. The bug actually REPLACED THE SHOW. Nothing makes up for the fact that they replaced A GOOD MINUTE OF THE SHOW WITH AN AD FOR THE CHANNEL. It wasn't much of an advertisement, just a bunch of random, annoying clips from all of Nick's shows. However, unlike the puppets, it replaced an actual part of the episode, and often times, the punchline of the show's best joke.
- Nick actually did a whole Marathon where the Rugrats would randomly run through parts of the show, too. The bugs actually ran by as part of a contest: Name what show, episode, and scene the baby ran by in, send it to Nick, and you'd be in the runnings for a treehouse.
- During the UK Nicktoons airing of Avatar. The bug most noticeable is a pole-vaulting brain-thing which happily runs across the entire screen, usually during a climactic scene, but their habit to smush the credits to start showing trailers goes wrong during the longer-running season finales. While watching it with my little sister - who'd never seen the show before - they started running a loud and spoileriffic trailer for the latter half of the final season during the final moments of the first season finale.
- Anybody who tries to watch anything on ABC Family has to put up with this crap! Let us watch Whose Line Is It Anyway without a popup for your lousy made for TV movies, dammit!
- While not an actual advert for anything, the Logo station has a very annoying station tag. A blue ball, bounces all over the screen with a loud video-game-ish plinking noise before settling in the lower right corner.
- The Australian sketch comedy show Comedy Inc. parodied this with a sketch featuring a CSI Miami parody where increasingly bigger fake pop-ups for the channel kept covering crucial items (first a seemingly critical piece of evidence, then a stripping character's nudity), at one point covering half the screen.
- This has gotten so bad on Cartoon Network, that now sometimes a gigantic ad advertising the next show will literally cover the bottom 40% of the screen.
- Toon Disney and Jetix
do did the same thing. The actual image ends up squashed and looking awful as everyone grows smaller and fatter due to compression.
- The premiere airing of one episode of Justice League had a bug that featured a giant robot, including metallic stomping and explosion sounds that actually obscured several lines of dialogue. Needless to say, the fans were not pleased.
- And of course there was the incident with the season 2 finale of Transformers Animated. It got its first English-language airing on YTV (oddly enough, it was aired in the Middle East, already dubbed into Arabic, several months prior), and the credits incuded a humorous dialogue between Megatron and Starscream's head, floating about stranded in an unidentified region of space. But the YTV airing dubbed over that dialogue with an interstitial from "the YTV guy", promting mass rage within the Transformers fandom (or at least those who appreciate Animated).
- It happened AGAIN with it's first airing on Cartoon Network.
- Weather reports. Ye flippin' gods, weather reports. They WON'T GO AWAY!! They're gigantic. They move. Budget for iTunes if you live in a place that gets weather.
- Someone once saw such a weather report with a warning for another state.
- Election results are even worse. Not only do they take the bottom third of the screen, they continuously repeat, and will even put a color bar on one side of the screen or the other. Sure, this keeps the aspect ratio right, but geez.
- The weather and election pop-ups are particularly fun for those of us who depend on Closed Captioning: often the equipment at the station which overlays the alert is misconfigured, causing the captioning to be entirely stripped while the alert is up. At least the online airings are often captioned now...
- This troper had a weather report warning about heavy winds show up, taking up the bottom third of the screen. Not so big a deal since they were high winds...the only problem was that the winds had been going on for half an hour before the screen popped up and then they left it up for 5 minutes on a loop warning people that the winds they could hear outside banging stuff around was fast. Did I mention this was at the end of the show where everything was resolved and there was no sound during the warning?
- A recent Scrubs episode had a parody on one of these, after JD thinks of a silly sitcom about the Janitor and Ted adopting a kid, called "Legal Custodians." The next time JD brings it up, a Bug for it appears at the bottom of the screen.
- 4Kids does this, and their logo is not particularly semi-transparent. This often makes it difficult to see useless things like life points, or the attack strength of a monster. Or So I Heard.
- In the last few years of its run, Toon Disney did similar things, not only popping up advertisements, but also taking up a fill third of the screen to show you a loud purple pattern giving the name of the show you are watching, for the benefit of parents who might find this more helpful in their decision-making process than just looking at the giant robots fighting on-screen.
- Comedy Central's Futurama ends with the credits being shown in a small 'tear' in the bottom of the screen while the beginning of the next episode starts. Great idea, saves time and everything, right? Well, except that it now completely blocks out the unique-per-episode punch line they have written on the bottom of the screen...
- Unless it's one of the few early episodes that starts with a cold opening, of course. Reruns of Scrubs do this, too, though both shows go back to the regular format if it precedes something like The Daily Show.
- An episode of Family Guy makes a "joke" using this where, during a feminist speech by Lois, Marge appears in a pop-up ad for The Simpsons at the bottom of the screen and Quagmire tries to have sex with her. It then shifts into an overly long Take That against The Simpsons.
- Family Guy also once did a running gag where characters would repeatedly break the Fourth Wall to complain about and kibbitz the pop-ups. Plus, most of these promos are for fake shows named after the image in the pop-up, such as "Shoving Buddies" or "Slowly Rotating Black Man".
- When Law And Order: Criminal Intent moved to USA Network, a gag ad
 was created where Goren wanted to know what the hell the USA bug in the corner of the screen was. He then tried unsuccessfully to interact with it before declaring it "weird".
- That's not new for USA Network shows, either. USA used to have somewhat annoying non-transparent bugs featuring Monk poking at the bug itself (distracting, to say the least), but they've since switched to mostly transparent USA logos and sometimes messages that a new episode of whatever show will be starting at x time.
- Television Without Pity forums has this post about a forum-er who saw The Reveal of a tattoo in a 7thHeaven rerun get covered up with a pop-up.
- Fox teased the premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles by randomly broadcasting a pair of red eyes on its feed during certain shows like Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares. Example.
- This article from a Rugrats fansite has a minor complaint about bugs covering up presenter captions on the Kids' Choice Awards.
- Parodied in a Strong Bad E-Mail where Strong Bad mentioned "Discovery Channel" specials about CGI dinosaurs. While he said this, a bug for the fictional CGI Walking With Trogdor appeared. Sadly, despite being a parody, it fit here, as it appeared exactly within the confines of the back of Strong Bad's head.
- Four Words: "Hi. I'm Ron Stuart."
- This troper recalls being severely annoyed while watching MASH on the Fox FX network (which as far as she knows no longer exists); pop-up ads for Nip/Tuck would appear at the bottom of the screen. The visuals of the ads weren't so bad, but the moving knives would be accompanied by knife-sharpening sound effects which drowned out the dialogue in the show.
- It was also annoying when they showed King Of The Hill reruns and you'd have to put up with lime green movie tickets flying around making "WHOOSH" noises while plugging whatever movie they were going to show that night. Oh, and FX is still around, presumably annoying viewers of Malcolm In The Middle with flying scalpels intended to plug Nip Tuck…
- Cartoon Network tends to smoosh the credits for ads for the preiemere of -all-original- shows. So basically, they spend time creating credit rolls for their own shows, which they then smoosh into unreadabillity. Is that even contractually allowed?
- Oh, Cartoon Network. Dear lord, how they love these things! Credits Pushbacks aside, they still love this trope. Have you ever run in just in time to see your favorite part of an episode, purely visual, and have the part where all the action is covered by, "ON NOW: CAMP LAZLO!" I never would have known!
- Then there were the bugs for that Star Wars animation series. With LIGHTSABER NOISES. It showed up during a "silent" section of Samurai Jack at least once.
- Game Show Network used to have a huge bug for PlayMania that went two-thirds of the way across the screen and about a quarter of the way up. Just barely wide enough to obscure the password in Password and its revivals (especially annoying when the password isn't whispered), the correct answer shown briefly to home viewers in Double Dare, etc.
- An ad that almost beats the Bill Engvall popup for the most intrusive Commercial Pop Up ever: a VH-1 advertisement for some show called "Scream Queens". The ad manifests itself as a HIGH-PITCHED SCREAM during an otherwise quiet moment in a show.
- Speaking of VH-1, the show Flavor of Love: Charm School had an ad for Celebrity Fit Club popp up. It takes up THE ENTIRE SCREEN, save for the TV rating bug.
- The website Blip.tv can be notorious for this, sometimes showing advertising bugs seemingly every 2 minutes, and every other bug is unhideable.
- This can get pretty bad during Professional Wrestling shows, as not only do the pop-ups take up space on the screen and distract from the match, but the commentators all of a sudden start ignoring the match and begin shilling for the show or product being advertised. Tremendously irritating.
- During the "world premiere" of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force film on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim Block, the movie was displayed without sound in a tiny box in the corner of the screen , and episodes of Family Guy and Futurama aired while the movie ran (in its entirety) in the corner. During this, humongous pop-up ads for the movie with loud sound effects also appeared from time to time.
- Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel LOVE to advertise when they have a new movie premiering soon. They'll put up a timer counting down to High School Musical or The Cheetah Girls or whatever they're going to show up to 24 HOURS beforehand! That is 48 shows they screw with just to advertise something that the people who are going to watch it already know when it's on given the insane amount of commercials. Does anyone care that Camp Rock is going to premiere in 21 hours, 42 minutes and 37 seconds?!?
- An even worse instance: If you've seen a PAL recording of the Phineas And Ferb episode "One Good Scare Ought to Do It!" on You Tube, chances are you had to put up with a little graphic on the right hand corner of the screen, advertising a sneak peek at High School Musical 3 airing the next day at 4:00 PM - for the entirety of the show. Apparently someone on the Disney Channel's European branch felt it wasn't enough to just show a first look at the film, but to continually remind everyone that they were showing a sneak peek when they most likely didn't need to be reminded.
- The pop-ups are especially annoying on programs that feature significant amounts of subtitling (Heroes and Lost). God forbid you try to actually watch a foreign movie that is entirely subtitled, only to have significant chunks of the film deprived of meaning by endless annoying adds for programs you couldn't care less about and wouldn't watch if you did simply as protest for the god-awful annoying, hateful if not downright evil pop-up ads! We're looking at you, TNT.
- During a showing of The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC, an ad filled the entire bottom of the screen for a western mini-series, accompanied by loud horse noises. Rather annoying, to say the least.
- The Emergency Alert System. Tests block out the entirety of the broadcast, hiding what would have been a good part of the show. If you're watching TV on a cable box, expect the cable box to be locked out to external control, forcing you to watch the EAS screen...
- MTV in the UK feel the need to keep the name of the programme you're watching on-screen at all times. While this is often helpful during music video slots, certainly themed ones (MTV UK is actually still reasonable for this, broadly speaking) it's less relevant during regular programming.
- In the episode "More Crap" of South Park, an Emmey winner advertisement then became a trophy given to Randy for having the biggest piece of crap in the world. It also showed when he was first making his winner at the beginning of the episode.
- A gag one happens with the network Logo Version on Chowder. Chowder scribbles on the screen and gets yelled at. After it's cleaned up he points over at the Cartoon Network logo and asks "What about that one?" to witch Gaspatcho responds "That one doesn't come off. I've tried" The Channel Icon is part of the episode making it obvious that the logo has changed since the episode's intial airing.
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