Regulators
Ad cap gets the chop as govt frees TV’s commercial break
After 20 years, the 12-minute leash on TV ads is off — and broadcasters can now sell airtime till the cows come home
NEW DELHI: The clock has finally stopped ticking on India’s television advertising. In a move that broadcasters have long lobbied for, the government has scrapped the 12-minute-per-hour cap on TV advertising, throwing open the floodgates for channels to pack in as many spots as the market will bear.
The cap, a relic of 2006, born under the Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994, has been shown the exit. And about time too, the ministry reckons. Back then, TV was a cosy little club of just 62 channels riding wheezy analogue cable with barely any room to breathe. Fast forward two decades, and the small screen has ballooned to more than 900 channels, all beamed digitally through DTH, cable, HITS and IPTV pipes that now carry anywhere between 300 and 500 channels or more.
Translation: viewers are spoilt rotten for choice, and the market, the ministry argues, is crowded enough to police itself.
The logic is simple. With that much competition, no channel can afford to bore its audience into the arms of a rival by drowning them in ads, or so the theory goes. The invisible hand, not the rulebook, will now keep the remote in check.
There was also the small matter of a lopsided pitch. Traditional broadcasters have been playing by rules their digital rivals never had to touch. OTT and digital platforms face no such ad-time straitjacket. The I&B ministry has now decided to level that field, ruling that there’s ample competition both within the TV pack and between TV and its digital challengers.
It’s a sweetener for an industry that lives and dies by advertising, whether a channel is pay or free-to-air. Ad revenue is the lifeblood, and the government has just opened the tap wider in the name of fair play and ease of doing business.
The fine print: the change kicks in only once the amendment to the Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994 is notified in the Gazette.
For broadcasters staring down soft ad markets, it’s a rare bit of good news. The commercial break, it seems, just got a licence to run long.
