ITV Discussion Thread

A promo was shown on Saturday night for ITV Drama in 2012. Rather than just focussing on just one programme, this one covers most of their dramas for the coming year.



I guess ITV were having problems trying to sell advertising space during last saturday night, because it aired a lot of adverts for itself. One break in particular was just made up of ads for ITV programmes.

Click here for promo

It's not that they can't sell the advertising, it's just they have a 40 minute quota in primetime (6-11pm) so usually an hour or so (generally either 6pm or 10pm) runs without ads.

Primeval S5, does anyone know when it will appear on ITV? and will Primeval: New World appear this year?

Based on previous years, Series 5 should've been on already, i.e. last month, so I don't know why it hasn't been on ITV yet. New World is currently in production, so I'd expect it in Autumn.

If Doctor Who isn't airing until late spring at the earliest, couldn't the run of Series 5 begin around the end of March? Are there only 6 episodes, or is it slightly longer? (I mention Doctor Who as I notice that they've never had them airing at the same time previously, possibly due to similar demographics)

Yep, it's six episodes.

That's quite common, it's all to do with the agreement drawn up for the merger of Carlton and Granada - the CRR, Contract Rights Renewal. I'm not entirely sure how it works but it means the number of ads they can show per evening is limited, so on a Saturday night they tend to concentrate all the adverts on the big prime-time programmes and not on those at the beginning and end of the evening

Doctor Who is not starting until at least September (and possibly late October, early November to get 6 or 7 episodes in before the Christmas special), from now on.....

CRR is something different actually - relates to how much ITV can charge for the advertising itself - the peak allowance is separate. Between 6 and 11 they can show 40 minutes of ads, so with a maximum of 12 per hour it stands to reason that some hours (the beginning and end as you say) will hold very little. It's also why an hour-long programme scheduled at, say, 2235 will have it's first break filled with promos and then have two full ad breaks in the second and third, because the second and third will fall after 2300 I.e. outside of peak. This has been going on for years - in fact way back in the days of the ITV Nightly News it would always start about 2304 so they could squeeze in the end break to the 2230 programme as a "post-peak" 2300 break! The fact it was always so late starting didn't help that programme which was struggling anyway...

In this case, wouldn't it make sense to drop the ad break in the news at 10, to make it a more appealing offering and on a level with the BBC?

There isn't an ad break in News at 10 (the vast majority of the time, anyway).

Has anyone else had one of these shoved through their door, perhaps restricted to the Tyne Tees Television region only?

http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w191/2007TopGearDog/itv1plus1sky1.jpg
Info on reverse

Does this mean we're getting our very own TTTV opt then? Because I for one yearn for the day we will be able to watch all of our favourite ITV1+1 shows, such as Jeremy Kyle USA and The Zone, interspersed with adverts for Collectables and Frank's Factory Flooring.

Everything crossed.