NBC Won't Run Amber Alerts In Commercials

[Moozik: Mesh - Hurt]

While watching Heroes last night, NBC issued an Amber Alert. Now while a tad annoying because of missing potentially important dialogue, I do understand why they do it. What surprised me about the whole thing is that they cut off the Amber Alert message as soon as they went to commercials. They literally cut the message off mid sentence which I thought was odd and just assumed the alert had ended. Oh no.

No. Instead, NBC ran the commercials in their entirety and then started the alert back up as soon as they went back to Heroes. To be honest I was really quite annoyed. The alert was deemed important enough to interrupt a prime-time TV show yet not important enough to interrupt their precious revenue stream. Excuses such as "well we wanted to make sure the message reached the widest audience" are, quite frankly, bollocks as you could run the alert during the actual show *and* in the commercials if you wanted to reach the widest audience.

I don't know if NBC are the only network that does this. I know a couple of '24' fans (airs the same time as Heroes) so I'll have to ask them if Fox did the same thing last night.

Update 01/31/2007: We spent a bunch of time discussing this at work today and while Fox did indeed have the Amber Alert, they did not break for commercials so can't really say if the whole 'protecting the revenue stream' is limited to NBC ;-)