You couldn't really blame Ofcom. Many thought it had been given a hospital pass by the Competition Commission when the latter, after poking its nose into the murky world of TV trading during its examination of the ITV merger, signalled its unease with various practices and suggested that the media regulator might want to scrutinise these further.
Ofcom's defence was that there was little demand from either broadcasters or advertisers for reform.
The truth is that the system's main bone of contention, agency share deals, where media buyers commit a share of their pooled client TV spend in return for price discounts, is favoured by big broadcasters and big advertisers alike.
So, the minnows, who complain about the system's lack of transparency and its locking in of historic TV spend patterns, curbing flexibility in reallocating budgets, could take a hike.
Yet, recent developments in Germany may put Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading back on the hook. There, the authorities have handed out huge fines to two broadcasters - RTL (owner of Five in the UK) and ProSiebenSat.1, which command a combined 80% share of the TV ad market - for operating anti-competitive agency share deals.
As here, the Germans are about to start their annual TV trading round and have rushed in a system based on discounts for each advertisers' TV spend, i.e line-by-line trading.
The unspoken truth about agency share deals is that the discounts that agencies negotiate from broadcasters are passed on disproportionately to big advertisers, new clients who have been promised better TV deals and those who may be about to call a review of their agency.
For the case for reform to be advanced here, smaller broadcasters and disadvantaged advertisers need to shout out. Isba, which represents big and small advertisers, is noticeably silent on the subject.
As with many things it seems, it might fall on the European Union to prod Ofcom into taking up the cudgels on behalf of the minnows and doing what some believe it irresponsibly shirked two Christmases ago.
Colin Grimshaw is the deputy editor of Media Week.