More than one million Telenet customers will no longer be able to skip commercials in one month's time, as the company is expanding stricter adveritising rules to older television decoders.
Under the new advertising model agreed upon between the telecom provider and the broadcasting groups, especially the commercial ones which are largely financed by advertising, it was decided that viewers would have to sit through up to one minute of advertising before they could watch their recorded programmes.
In addition, the regular commercial breaks in programmes requested via the "Terugkijk TV" function (recorded TV function) would no longer be able to be skipped, but the programme content itself can still be fast-forwarded.
During the night of 23 to 24 June, the other customers - more than a million - who still have an older decoder, will no longer be able to skip advertising when watching programmes in these ways, according to Belga News Agency.
Free service in exchange for ads
In exchange for having to watch the commercials, all customers will receive the "Terugkijk TV" service, with which they can catch up on programmes from the last seven days.
Telenet was the first operator to respond to the call from commercial channels to introduce an adapted, uniform model for TV advertising, in order to "strengthen the local TV market."
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For the channels of DPG Media (VTM) and SBS (Play), Telenet introduced this system at the end of September on its latest-generation decoders, the so-called "TV-box". Some 400,000 customers have this decoder and therefore also have to follow the stricter advertising rules.
Meanwhile, competitor Proximus has also already introduced restrictions on fast-forwarding advertising but has not yet gone as far as Telenet. When watching programmes on demand, advertising cannot be skipped, but there are no restrictions on recordings or pauses for the time being.
