Feature | TRAI cannot force norms: Broadcasters

Worse is a cricket match, where these days one has to wait for the television commercial to spin its full reel to see the replay of a wicket that has just fell, or to relive a Sachin Tendulkar hundred.

Well The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is here to the rescue. TRAI has come up with a proposal to regulate the duration, frequency, timing of advertisements with a view of digitization in mind.

TRAI, in its paper, says that free-to-air channels should not carry ads exceeding 12 minutes per hour (inclusive of 10 minutes of commercials and two minutes of self promotions) and pay channels not over six minutes of ads an hour.

Currently there are 163 pay TV channels in the country, which accounts for Rs 11,600 crore, which is made in ad revenues in the television industry. Add to that another Rs 21,300, which accounts for subscription revenues. But owing to leakages in the broadcasting system, pay channels depend more on advertising than subscription revenues.

Himanka Das, Senior Vice President ' West, Carat Media Services feels that Indian market has not matured enough to accept the implementation of capping up of the advertisement time. "Internationally, broadcasters depend significantly on the distribution revenue rather than on air time revenue. It is exactly vice versa in India owing to the lack of full data on distribution numbers. Therefore, the kind of cap the regulator is trying to enforce on advertisement time will have a direct impact on broadcasters being forced to increase air time cost which is not a healthy scenario for marketers/ advertisers.

Pawan Jailkhani, Executive Vice President- Sales, 9X Media Pvt. Ltd. feels it's premature to concentrate on details and TRAI reasoning needs to be discussed.

"It is too premature to comment as no concrete details are there. TRAI is also seeking a feedback from stakeholders regarding this. In India, the basic revenue model is advertisements for all the genres and digitization and cable are still at low pace," Jailkhani says.

"TRAI's reasoning needs to be discussed and debated as all the television channels are not paid channels where subscription is an important revenue stream. Majority of the channels today such as Zee, Sony and us, are self-regulated and know our limits and will not over sell at the cost of losing audience eye balls.

"I hope TRAI will come out with a proper and fair guidelines for all including the digital and DTH," he adds.

TRAI has asked stakeholders to send their comments to its proposals by March 27. Broadcasters, however, have asked for more time to send their comments on the proposal.