Ofcom

Ofcom, formed as the Office Of Communications is the independent government approved regulator and competition authority designed for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom. The regulator was first established in 2002 by the Office of Communications Act, but was still in the process of formation during December 2003. Ofcom received its full authority from the Communications Act 2003. Ofcom is respomsible for addressing the interests of the citizens and consumers and protecting the public from harmful and offensive material. The regulator licences all commercial television and radio services in the UK. As well as having to agree to the terms of their licence, Ofcom have also enforced a 'Broadcasting Code' which includes a set of rules and regulations that all broadcast television and radio must abide by, or face being revoked. As part of Ofcom's regularity duties, they must analyse specific complaints that are at risk of breaking the broadcasting code. Ofcom requests response from the broadcaster to the complaint. On the basis of this response Ofcom will mark the complaint as either "upheld" or "not upheld", or alternatively simple "resolved".

 A mission statement made by Ofcom's 'Watershed' on November 28th 2011 stated that: "Protecting children from harmful or inappropriate material on TV and Radio is one of Ofcom's most important duties".

Ofcom however are not responsible for regulating disputes between you and your telecom provider, complaints about accuracy in BBC programmes, premium rates services (including mobile text services and ringtones), the content of television and radio advertisements, the BBC TV licence fee; or newspapers and magazines.

The research that I have found shows that a quatre of the 768 teenagers between the ages of 12-17 had watched something on television (before the invention of the Watershed) that made them feel uncomfortable or that they had found offensive.  

The top five concerns measured as a percentage of all teens questioned were:

• sexuall explicit content=7%
• offensive/explicit language=4%
• violence=4%
• Nudity=2%
• News=1%
• Mistreatment of animal=1%

Although Ofcom is used to regulate and monitor television programmes some elements can be applied to various types of films. With our own media product all of our actors that will be starring in our film trailer will be 18 and over, which means that the actors that will be starring in our film trailer will not need to present permission forms from their parents. However our ideal target audience between the ages of 15-25 so when creating our film trailer we will have to take in to account what will offend or be considered too inappropriate for younger audience viewers.