Report says all commercial channels should be have an equal limit of seven minutes of adverts an hour
There should be less advertising on television, a move that would "greatly improve the viewer experience", according to a Lords committee.
Viewers are unlikely to quibble with the recommendation from the House of Lords communications committee's report on TV advertising, although commercial broadcasters may be less enthusiastic about a potential reduction in their main source of income.
Another of the committee's recommendations is that ITV should be freed from current restrictions on what it can charge for advertising airtime, in return for a promise to spend up to �55m more a year on UK-originated output, including children's, current affairs and arts programming.
The committee wants existing broadcasting rules changed to reduce the average amount of advertising viewers see each hour, setting a limit of seven minutes across all commercial channels.
Under current regulations commercial public service broadcasters ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5 are permitted to air an average of seven minutes of ads an hour, and up to eight minutes during peak time, between 6pm and 10.30pm.
Other commercial channels ? including ITV2, E4 and Sky1 ? are allowed an average of nine minutes of ads an hour and a maximum of 12 minutes an hour in peak.
The chairman of the communications committee, Lord Clement-Jones, said the move would "greatly improve the viewer experience" and be "fairer" to commercial public service broadcasters.
However, TV industry trade body the Satellite and Cable Broadcasting Group forecast that the move would cost �80m a year in advertising revenue and could force the closure of some smaller channels. The committee disagreed with the group's numbers, arguing that the main source of revenue for satellite and cable channels is subscriptions, rather than advertising, and only a "very small number" would be at risk.
The committee also called for the removal of Contracts Rights Renewal, the mechanism governing what ITV can charge advertisers for airtime on its main channel, ITV1, as long as the broadcaster agrees to plough extra cash into programming.
Archie Norman, the ITV chairman, told the committee at a hearing last year that the CRR mechanism forces the company into a "ratings rat race" and drives it to produce "lowest common denominator advertising".
The committee believes that ITV would be able to increase ad revenues by �30m to �55m a year if it was free to drive harder bargains with advertisers.
Clement-Jones said that the trade-off would be for ITV to agree to invest a "pretty high proportion" ? well over 50% ? of this additional revenue into new programmes. "Extra revenue should not go back to shareholders," he added. "It could begin to make a big difference in some genres. ITV does very little children's programming anymore, for example."
The committee also called for a full review of the advertising market to be conducted by a "small expert panel", to be selected by culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, so that any changes could be fed swiftly into a new communications act.
Such a review is typically handled by Ofcom, but the committee believes that using the media regulator would lead to an "unduly protracted" process that could take years, resulting in a "lengthy period of uncertainty" for broadcasters and advertisers.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/17/tv-ads-lords-report
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