bye bye ads?

The question is why does Children's programming, especially on ITV, have low viewing figures???

1. Quality of the programmes - even children know good quality from cheap
2. When is CiTV on???? - one way of losing viewers fast!
3. Originally reducing the time of the afternoon slot for children
4. Choice of programmes - or should that be lack of

If the US networks can still produce a full genre of mainly succesful children's programmes - why can't we? - or is it a case that we are now totally reliant on US shows (shows with incorrect English - but what does fanny mean to the yanks and what does it mean to us Brits for instance????) - but as there is only so many US shows made and most of those are tied to satellite channels and British commercial networks not prepared to invest in children's what does one do apart from show less childrens and lose the viewers and potential future viewers - as one person has already said in another thread most children nowadays go from CBeebies or Milkshake to CBBC to C4/T4/E4 - thus ITV lose out on every turn - not good for its future if the viewing habits of these people means that they actually stay away from ITV as a whole (only watching the odd programme here or there).

It's not just CITV, Children's programmes across the board have low figures

TMi gets around 250,000 viewers

This is with no competition from CITV, explain that?

Easy enough - BBC moved children's programmes to BBC2 - not a ntural station to go to after so many years on BBC1 so many decided to either go to the satellite channels for the cartoons (which even I must admit are far superior to the cartoons shown on terrestrial stations - because for some reeason the ones on ITV and BBC seem to be very PC instead of the ones they used to show - i.e. action, comedy etc...). Also Soccer AM is very much a cult show nowadays and that, too, gets its fair share of children watching it nowadays. Rememeber TMi is nowhere near as good in quality or production like the old L&K, Going Live, Swap Shop etc - they all had that something extra which worked compared to nowadays - possibly risqueness or pushing the boundaries compared to todays standard - also these magazine shows also gained an adult following which the newer shows (including TMi) just does not get. The last show to really do that was SMTV. IN fact they weer actually family shows with a slightly more slant towards children/teenagers - whereas today they are purely aimed at children - hence loss of viewers

Indeed. But even then the magazine shows often ran for about two hours and there was next to no advertising during them. How many on average - four? Five at the most? Compare to today where you can quite easily find eight, nine, maybe even ten commercial slots? Even in today's climate you find the programmes in the magazines are split, often across a commercial break.



We have gone so far down the American route its untrue. Apparently American hour-long programming now only runs for 42mins; the other 18mins are adverts. Our average is "only" 12mins an hour, and I consider this to be close to if not the point of overkill, considering you can flick around every commercial channel on Freeview on occasion to find every single one of them showing an advert.

Two simple answers:

1) News: Package the programmes like the BBC, so local & national news are linked as one item, bringing the programme length over the magical 30 mins. Insert as many ad breaks as you like.

2) Childrens: Split 30 minute programmes into two seperate episodes of 15 minutes, complete with titles & credits. Have the middle titles/credits squashed while another programme is previewed, or make them very short (e.g have an extended set of titles/credits for every other show). Then insert ad break between each part of the double bill.