2 hours ago
The government has removed the 12-minute non-programme content cap per hour for television channels, thereby allowing them to compete with other television channels and digital media channels.
In a notification on Friday, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said that the 12-minute advertising cap, which was introduced in 2006, had outlived its utility since the number of channels had increased from 62 then to more than 900 now.
“In India, the sector is heavily dependent on advertising, irrespective of whether a channel is ‘pay’ or ‘free-to-air’. Furthermore, there was a non-level playing field for traditional TV channels vis-à-vis digital media, where no such stipulation on advertisement cap regulation exists,” the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said.
Introduced on August 14, 2006, the advertisement cap rule mandated that any television channel could only have 12 minutes of non-programme content per hour. This 12-minute window was further subdivided into 10+2, where only 10 minutes of advertisements and two minutes of self-promotion for the television channel were allowed.
In the change announced on Friday, the Ministry of I&B said that since 2006, the situation has changed by a lot and there now exists adequate competition in the market within the TV industry and between the TV industry and digital media.
Though television channels had challenged the government's rule in 2006, the Delhi High Court had upheld the rule then, stating that there was “no constitutional guarantee of profitability or unlimited monetisation of public resources”.
