Hero to zero? Not yet: a 50-year view of commercial TV
Roderick White
Commercial television in the UK is just over 50 years old, and is currently worth some £4 billion in adspend, according to the latest figures from the Advertising Association's Advertising Statistics Yearbook.
Terrestrial channels still account for 70% of this, though satellite has been steadily eroding their position over the nearly 15 years for which comparable adspend data are readily available, and terrestrial-only homes are now only 18% of the BARB universe.
Satellite, in fact, came onstream when, retrospectively, the glory days of TV were already...