Keeping in view the increasing duration and distracting formats of advertisements which has adversely affected the consumers’ viewing experience and striking a balance between giving consumers a good TV viewing experience, and protecting the interests of all the stakeholders of the television industry, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released a consultation paper on “Issues Related to Advertisements in TV.

TRAI feels that the advertisement revenue has been a substantial portion of the overall television industry revenues leading to the tendency of pushing more and more advertisements in the television programmes in both pay and FTA channels. This has been reflected in numerous consumer complaints and opinions being expressed at various fora.

“With the primary objective of striking a balance between giving consumers a good TV viewing experience, and protecting the interests of all the stakeholders of the television industry, TRAI, suo motu, is taking up a review of existing regulations on duration of advertisements and their format of presentation in television channels in India”, TRAI said in a stament.

This consultation paper after analyzing various issues, brings out a proposal for regulating the advertisement duration and format in television channels for consultation with the stakeholders.

The proposal includes prescribing upper limit for the duration of advertisements on clock hour basis, different maximum limits for the duration of advertisements in FTA and Pay channels in a clock hour and scheduling advertisement breaks only during the interruption in the sporting.

Apart from this defining time gaps between consecutive advertisements breaks during telecast of movies and other programmes, permissibility of part screen advertisements, prescribing screen area in case of news channels for running non-commercial scrolls, tickers etc and prescribing audio level of advertisements viz-a-viz rest of the programmes are part of proposal.