Video really did kill the radio star

A quarterly Broadcasting Authority (BA) survey on radio and television audiences, released this week, has shown that almost half of the Maltese population does not listen to radio.

In fact, radio reach figures published by the BA on Monday show that from April to June, only 54.426% of the sample responded that they had listened to radio during that quarter.

During the same quarter, 42.389% of the sample had declared that they did not listen to radio, another 3.167% declared that they had no particular radio station for which they listened, while the remaining 0.715% said they could not remember.

This is most probably explained by the fact that during that quarter, the FIFA World Cup was played in South Africa between 11 June and 11 July 2010, which glued people to their television screens for a whole month.

Over the past three years, the average of non-radio listeners has hovered between a low of 43.787% in the July to September 2009 quarter and a high of 48.482 in the October to December 2007 quarter.

Conversely, the average of radio listeners has oscillated between a low of 44.111% during the July to September 2007 quarter to a high of 54.461% in the October to December 2009 quarter.

The same BA has also shows that a quarter of the Maltese population does not watch television.

In fact, television reach for the April to June 2010 quarter has shown that 24.849% of respondents had declared that they had not watched television during that quarter.

During the same quarter, 5.498% had declared that they had no particular television station that they watched during that quarter, and the remaining 0.880% had declared that they could not remember which television station they had watched.

Hence the percentage of television viewers for the April to June 2010 period stood at 68.774%.

Over the past three years, the average of non-television listeners stood from a low of 21.229% during the April to June 2008 quarter to a maximum of 33.222% during the July to September 2007 quarter.

Conversely, the percentage of television viewers for the past four years ranged from a maximum of 71.457% in the October to December 2009 quarter to a minimum of 50.778% in the July to September 2007 quarter.

For the second quarter in the last four years, there were no people who declared that they did not have a television set at home.

This percentage oscillated between a maximum of 0.766% during the October to December 2006 quarter to 0.224% in the January to March 2009 quarter.

This was perhaps an indication of how the prices of television sets have become so low over the past few years that even people who lived on a meagre income and the elderly could now afford to buy one.