Press Statement: Commercials
By John Terris, QSO
Wednesday, 02 March 2016
The recently adopted practice of the TV networks of butting commercials hard up against the concluding scenes of the preceding programme, is offensive and insulting to the viewer, and an encroachment on their rights, and is clearly designed to force the viewer to watch the commercials, even when they will often have better things to do.
Getting rid of the traditional "fade to black" which, since TV's inception has represented the punctuation to allow the viewer to turn the set off or take a break themselves, is replaced in recent practice by commercials with no break from the programme material preceding it.
This appears to be a fight back by the TV channels against set-top-boxes, which allow viewers to skip commercials entirely, which has made these devices extremely popular. Who would willingly and deliberately watch some of the rubbish material served up as commercials? The recently introduced practice of eliminating the commercial break entirely, is an encroachment on viewer's right to withhold their attention from commercials if they so choose.
It also forces the viewer to watch the channel's own trailers for its forthcoming programmes, by overlaying these against the preceding programme credits, in a facile attempt to keep the viewer locked in to a particular channel. This is offensive and insulting because it makes the credits for the programme about to end, impossible to read.
Everybody knows that we have to have commercials in order to pay for free-to-air television.
That does not mean that we should be forced to watch them whether we like it or not.
It says much for the way that advertisers have taken over the free-to-air space, that successive governments have refused to act on this abuse of viewer rights by allowing a complaints regime which was designed for a one channel system and which after thirty years is now completely out of date, to continue to operate and thus allow an inept and hopelessly outdated complaints system to be the only avenue of viewer redress.
John Terris is National President for Media Matters in NZ, and is a former Deputy Speaker, NZ House of Representatives.
Tel: (04) 566 3175
