Media Forum: Can relaxed rules clear AFP for take-off?

Will the new Ofcom guidelines result in a boom for advertiser-funded programming? Alasdair Reid investigates. For a decade or more, advertiser-funded programming has been touted far and wide as the future of television. It was the future of television when everyone was looking at the possible impact of digital and trying to work out how an increasingly fragmented broadcast economy would be funded. Then it became, even more clearly, the future when the industry realised a few years back that personal video recorders were about to destroy advertising as we knew it.