Non-Stop ‘Family Guy’: Here’s How the Fox Animated Comedy’s No-Ad Experiment Played Out

On Sunday Fox aired a special episode of Family Guy that contained no commercials. Instead, PlayStation sponsored the broadcast and aired 60-second ads before and after the show, allowing fans to bask in a glorious 25 minutes of commercial-free entertainment. We worked with Inscape, the TV measurement company with glass-level data from a panel of more than 8 million smart TVs and devices, to see how viewership of this episode compared with previous ad-packed episodes. In short, something interesting happened on Sunday: Live viewership trended up slightly, whereas during the previous two episodes that aired in January, the number of households tuning in declined a bit over the course of each broadcast.Sunday's episode:The January 7th and 14th broadcasts: It will be interesting to see if more networks experiment with uninterrupted broadcasts or limited ad breaks...we’ll be staying tuned!