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Gerald Fenech
Politically-owned stations have lost popularity across the board, while Church-owned radio stations appear to be on the rise, a cursory glance at the latest Broadcasting Authority Audience survey will reveal.
On both Radio and TV, the biggest loser appears to be the Nationalist Party, which has seen a 40 per cent drop in Radio 101’s audience share, while NET TV has hit an all-time low of 10.8 per cent: dropping to fourth place behind TVM, One TV, and “other television stations” (excluding foreign).
For its part, privately-owned Smash TV came in at a smashing low of 0.1 per cent.
Released this week, the survey covers the period from January to March, and largely confirms its predecessor’s trends: Xarabank remains the most popular programme on TV with an estimated 30.7 per cent of audience share on Friday evenings, closely followed by Tista Tkun Int with 27.69 per cent. Both programmes are TVM stalwarts.
A surprise inclusion at third place for TV programmes is the hugely popular soap opera on One TV, Gizelle, which manages a surprising 23.26 per cent audience share on Tuesday evenings. In fourth place is rapidly growing Showtime, which garners a creditable 17.69 per cent, pipping Eileen Montesin’s never-ending soap, Dejjem Tieghek Becky, in fifth. Currently battling Dutch giant Endemol in court, TVM’s L-Ispjun comes in sixth with 13.85 per cent on Wednesdays.
In seventh place is Bondiplus, accounting for 10 per cent of Tuesday evening viewing: no doubt the biggest loser to Gizelle. Not far behind the WE frontman is One TV’s Charlon Gouder, whose politically charged Vici Versa manages a creditable 8.46 per cent. By way of contrast, the supposedly much more established Bla Agenda, fronted by veteran broadcaster Norman Hamilton, languishes in ninth place with just 4.62 per cent.
On the radio front, the big gains once again fell to Calypso Radio, now firmly entrenched in second place behind One Radio at 17.4 per cent: an almost two per cent rise from the previous survey. With 19.7 per cent, One is down by a hefty five percentage points. Another substantial gainer is RTK, placing third with 13.3 per cent, an increase of 3.5 points, whilst the other religious station, Radju Marija, is also up by 1.6 per cent place fourth with 7.8 per cent.
The excellent performance of the Church-owned stations could bear some relation to the new Archbishop’s ordination, with abnormally high audiences registered in January when the event occurred.
All other stations appear to have lost ground, except Magic Radio and Capital Radio: the latter more than doubling its paltry Nov-Dec share of 2.1 per cent to a healthy 5.4 per cent. Former FM Bronja frequency (now “magically” transformed) goes up to a respectable 3.6 per cent whilst Bay Radio loses two points to 7.6 per cent. Smash Radio, XFM and Radju Malta maintained the same levels from the previous survey, but the real big loser in the big picture was definitely the Nationalist Party’s station, Radio 101, which polled only 4.2 per cent: down 40 per cent from an already worrying 7 per cent in Nov/Dec.
Back to television, and TVM remained the most popular station by far with 29.3 per cent audience share followed by One TV at 23.8 per cent. The gap between the two stations is now wider as in Nov/Dec it was only 1.7 percentage point. NET TV actually loses its third spot to a group of “other” TV stations, probably the popular sports channels. The PN station now polls just 10.8 per cent, down from 13.3 per cent in January. On ratings averaging 2 to 6 per cent are the foreign stations, including RAI, Mediaset and the BBC.
TVM remains the station with the highest peak share of audiences in peak hours with a 17.28 per cent rating at 9pm, no doubt propelled by Xarabank, Becky and Tista Tkun Int. One TV’s highest share is 8.81 per cent at 830pm whilst NET breaks the 4 per cent barrier at the same time.
In the radio section, Calypso tops the standings with a peak of 4.91 per cent consistently from 9 to 10 am followed by One Radio at 4.35 per cent at 11.30. However Calypso runs at 4.9 to 4.46 per cent for practically the whole morning, due to popular programmes ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Bejn il Hbieb’ presented by Eileen Montesin and Enzo Gusman.
An interesting fact which comes out of the survey is that cable subscriptions are slightly down to 65.3 per cent, compared to 66.9 per cent in Nov/Dec. The gainer appears to have been satellite, now up by almost 2 points to 8.2 per cent. In the meantime, analogue are down to 21.7 percent from 24.3 percent whilst digital aerials are up to 4 per cent from 1.6 per cent. Just 0.7 per cent of Maltese do not have a TV set. |
