It's election night and I've got broadcast TV turned on for the first time since...well, November 2016. Flipping around trying to avoid commercials and noticing that (as I remember from my younger days) all the networks broadcast their commercials at the same time.
This must be by agreement, right? It can't be that news naturally comes in these x-minute blocks and then a commercial is called for. Same with scripted shows, sure they have a certain pacing, but broadly uniform commercial breaks wouldn't be the result. For one thing we have the example of cable, where you can frequently find programming during network commercials. And other countries that arrange their commercials very differently, and yet still manage nightly news and three-act sitcoms and what have you.
So what would it take to get a network to "counter-program" against the others in terms of airing programming while they're showing commercials? What would be a good POD? Would it affect the pacing and length of "standard" formats like the sitcom?