Website Of The Week – Independent Television Commission
Whilst the ITC unquestionably provides a very important public service in the regulation of television, its activities and consultations are not really the stuff of excitement – a least not for your average punter. The ITC’s website, which has been recently redesigned, has to be viewed in this light. The Commission’s website is there to provide information about its activities in the regulation of the TV industry as quickly and as easily as possible. In this respect the priorities are that it is clear and fast.
The site is designed by Virtual Publishing House (VPH), which also designed sites for the Advertising Standards Association and More Group, and does succeed in being clear and speedy. All the text and information is presented in the centre of a ‘television screen’ with the ‘channel’ buttons placed down the left of the screen. This makes it extremely easy to navigate through the site’s different pages and content.
The content ranges from the basics of what the ITC is all about to more detailed coverage of its current consultations and recommendations. An aspect of the site which stands out as very impressive, but should really just be standard, is that its latest news and press releases are always bang up to date. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, it is one of the fundamental functions of the internet that it provides constantly updated information – there are no printing or broadcast restrictions so information can be added as it is available.
For anyone wishing to learn more about the operation of the ITC, this site is full of resources. It explains how the ITC consults external advisory bodies in its investigations; the Central Religious Advisory Committee and the Schools Advisory Committee are two examples of this. It also explains the different ways in which the Commission licenses and regulates the industry. These include regulation for advertising, economics, programmes and technical quality.
The information in these sections is very well laid out and provides easy links to next and previous pages. It would be easy with this kind of material for the site to become swamped in reams of text but VPH has kept things clear and commonsense. Probably the only point at which the site is not user-friendly is the search facility. The search allows you to check the whole site’s contents for any document containing a specific word or phrase. However, the results it returns are presented as esoteric filenames, document names or file paths. This means it’s very difficult to figure out what each document is about and whether it’s worth reading.
That aside, the ITC website is a very useful resource for anyone working in, or interest in, the television industry. A full set of contacts for both the Commission itself and most of the companies or bodies with which it liaises are also given; especially useful if you’re researching a particular subject and need to speak to the relevant people.
As I said, on the whole not particularly exciting apart from the viewer complaints reports which are often pretty funny. The classic was complaints that background noises of a pig and a woman indulging in ‘an act’ upset the viewers of Brookside (see Pig Noises Upset Brookside Viewers). Regulation doesn’t come more sensational than that.