This post is going to be another one of my “rants” but it’s probably one that annoys me quite a lot. When watching a usual half hour long television programme on a channel which is privately owned, the adverts usually follow this structure:
- programme starts (00 mins)
- commercial break (12 mins)
- programme continues (15 mins)
- programme ends (27 mins)
- commercial break
- next programme starts (00 mins)
(XX mins) are the number of minutes into the programme.
Unfortunately, the Indian soap channel, Star Plus, has another advert structure which is quite annoying and this is as follows:
- programme starts (00 mins)
- commercial break (05 mins)
- programme continues (10 mins)
- commercial break (14 mins)
- programme continues (19 mins)
- programme ends (30 mins)
- next programme starts (00 mins)
These are the times I recorded when I once watched an episode of the all women show, Saathiya. So as you can see a viewer has to watch 9 minutes of adverts in the the first 19 minutes of the programme. This is obviously good for those companies who are advertising as it is more affective for them however as this is a paid channel so revenue for star plus is not all earned by advertising. The worst thing about the adverts is that it predominantly consists of two companies playing the same advert twice: Southall Travel, Claim Time Solicitors. They do play other adverts but those are the main two which I pretty much know the words to.
The next thing which is annoying is the gap between the current programme and the next programme – there isn’t any! There aren’t even any credits. It literally jumps from one programme to the next without any obvious gaps in between. This is where the second set of adverts should be in all honesty as people might not want to watch it and get ready to watch another programme on another channel such as Eastenders after Saathiya. I have heard of cases where sometimes viewers think they are watching the same programme because of their being no gap between the programmes and it takes around 5 minutes for them to realise that they are watching a different programme. As funny as that is, which it is hilarious, it can ruin the mood a viewer would take into viewing the next episode of the programme they wanted to watch.
Judging by Ofcom’s code of scheduling of television advertising who are the regulator of communications in UK, what Star Plus are doing is a exploiting a loop hole in this code to what should be deemed illegal. As viewers, these unnatural breaks during the programmes makes it rather difficult to watch and it seems as though the channel is out there to make more money over actually providing entertainment for the viewers. Should a good number of people see this as unfair then it would be something worth making apparent to Ofcom who would investigate.
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