Someone asked today, “is it illegal to fast forward TV adverts?”.
An interesting question, but no, it is not illegal. The growth of digital boxes with hard drives has resulted in many people skipping adverts. Whether you record a program or have a box (such as the Humax Freesat boxes) that will always keep the last 2 hours of the channel recorded, you can easily skip adverts.
One “trick” many people now do is start to watch programs in commercial channels around 15 minutes after they start, then rewind to view from the beginning, then as the adverts come on, skip through them. For a 1 hour program you will finish watching at about the same time, but with no adverts.
Although it will certainly annoy broadcasters when people do this, there is nothing that they can do, and there is no requirement to watch adverts anyway. For many years I have made use of the mute button when adverts come on the tele. If advertisers did not insist on having the volume of their adverts higher than the program I am watching, I would probably leave the sound on. But the increase in volume annoys me, so I hit mute.
So, next time you are watching a TV show on “playback”, don’t forget, you have a fast forward button.
