A question about early Saturday evening adbreaks on ITV.

The 40 minute rule is so archaic. I’ve no issue with the 12 minutes per hour or 7 minutes over 24 hours, but 40 minutes between 6-11pm just seems pointlessly restrictive and encourages them to put no effort into the 6pm and 10pm hours because they’d just lose money on any expense. Pointless exercise.

Thank you for the responses on this - I saw a bit of Catchphrase and wondered about the lack of ads.



2009, Everton v Liverpool in the FA Cup


some regions saw this (quite a goal to miss too):

Completely disagree - it benefits us hugely as viewers to have virtually commercial free news most nights and gives channels the flexibility to show programmes that may not appeal to advertisers in primetime.

Now there might be an argument to tweak it to 45 minutes but going to 60 would be of no benefit to the viewers. What is a real shame is that broadcasters don't use it more to their advantage - Dancing on Ice would benefit hugely from having 3-4 breaks rather than 6, while ad free films against Strictly for example if marketed right could prop up their whole evening.

I went to a baseball game while in the USA with some relatives in 2010 and us Brits wondered why play kept stopping every so often, our American relatives told us it was because this game was being televised and they stop for adverts.

Agree on commercial free news but the point about programmes that don’t appeal to advertisers doesn’t really stack up as they have breaks in them anyway. They could still show those programmes if they wanted to with adverts and make some money on them. Most advertising isn’t done through spot buying anyway so the advertisers often don’t choose exactly which programmes their adverts go into. They just buy a certain number of spots to reach a certain number of viewers, normally in particular demographics, and the sales team allocate the adverts. You do get spot buying in the bigger shows and certain specific shows but it’s not the majority.

It would benefit the viewers if it encouraged more commissioning in the shoulder peak hours rather than relying on films and repeats. I’m not saying increase the number of adverts across the day, just allow more flexibility in the spread.

Ad free films might rate OK against Strictly but it wouldn’t be any use to ITV because they’d make no money on them.

Twice in fact!

The FA Cup mistake had a terrible knock on effect for the rest of the evening IIRC. Continuity was pretty much out cold and the news that followed was introduced with a full VT clock countdown.

Pretty certain that's nonsense, in this country at least. The ITA would never have allowed that, and the vast majority of games were shown as highlights, so no need to interrupt play to fit in commercials.

How do ad breaks work in the Netherlands?

I watched a 1hr 30m programme on NPO1 Saturday night which had no ad breaks but it seemed that they showed a good 5-10 minutes of them before and after! (Adverts and channel promotions)

NPO shows programming from different broadcasters, depending upon a particular programme it may not be permitted to carry ads during the show. Similar to BBC programmes that are shown on S4C

Of course back in the past when the TV landscape was different you would have great chunks of programming that wasn't allowed to have commercials all over it. Schools programming is the classic example here, some religious programmes and one or two other things.

There were always exceptions to the rules though - the original run of the Krypton Factor for some reason lost in the mists of time went for quite a while without an internal ad break, but I think Granada's hand was ultimately forced in the 1990s, and then I presume it was twisted right off for the 1995 series but we won't talk about that.

That's still the case, it's just that there isn't really any schools programming left to be interrupted by ads. (That said, who knows what might return in the coming weeks!)

Royal ceremonies and Parliamentary coverage also have restrictions.

The full code is at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/32162/costa-april-2016.pdf