Plan to ban television advertising

Ok its not as dramatic as it first sounds, but the implications could be massive due to a recent European Union proposition to ban television advertising during news and children's television programs lasting less than 30 minutes. Here in the UK this would hit already struggling (mainly the maker of its own demise, but unable to be dynamic enough to change this) and Five.

The proposal was contained within the EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive, and stipulates that children's and news programmes should be interrupted only once every half hour for advertising. In most cases on ITV and Five the children's and news programmes only last 30 minutes to begin with which leave no space at all for a commercial break.

The House of Lords European Union Committee said it was "concerned about the likely implications of these rules for free-to-air programming".

Five's deputy head of corporate affairs said "The economics of children's programming are fairly fragile already," and no doubt ITV would agree. Without the right economics for children's programming to sustain themselves (or even be mildly subsidised) televisions channels would probably opt to produce less original shows and import cheaper imports. Not that there is anything with imported children's programmes, I grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but without the advertising revenue channels like ITV and Five wont be able to import this generations popular shows.

ITV's controller of regulatory affairs Magnus Brooke said "the impact on news broadcasting would be no less grave". He went on to say "the rules would penalise the provision of core public service content and make it much harder to generate any revenue at all from providing that content" and described the directive as a "very strange thing".

I personally can't see how they can make this a law, television channels such as ITV could easily cut the number of children's programmes and news broadcasts to help fill the gap. Not that I wouldn't mind less of the ITV news as I find it atrocious compared to the likes of Sky and BBC broadcasts, for some reason they have to over dramatize every bloody thing like on American news programmes (tonight we report on how paper clips could end the world!!! and so on).

If this bizarre directive does get the approval from the EU big wigs the UK would have to bring it into effect within 3 years. I can't see the benefit of bringing in such a silly law, but we shall see what happens in the near future.