I can't speak for the US or any other country, but in the UK it seems common practice now to split the screen at the end of a movie while the credits are going up the screen.

Here they trail the next programme and any that may be following it. I feel this ruins the end of a perfectly good movie. Another point with this split screen, and the narrowing of the image, it's impossible to look for a cast member who played a part in the production and with the talk over this ruins a very good piece of film music.

This not only annoys me, it infuriates me. And if anything it is just as bad or worse on the non-premium cable channels, with respect to both the credit-squeezing and the time given to commercials. I can't understand why this is tolerated by the masses, except I have the feeling that most simply accept blatant rudeness and commercialism as everyday facts of life.

The last time I timed it I found, on the average cable channel, a 15 or 20 minute lead-in for a movie followed by 4-5 minutes of commercials and thereafter 9-12 minutes of movie followed by 3-4 minutes of commercials.

They have recently started doing it here too. I suspect it has something to do with high quality TV broadcasts that can be burnt to DVD and sold.  I'm going to write to my pay tv provider and complain about it...  it's even started happening on movie channels where I thought they'd have more respect for a film.