High ratings on the public channel, due to Euro 2008

June 11, 2008 on 4:12 pm | by Iulian Comanescu | In Television |

The first channel of the public television achieved high ratings and more than 50% market share due to the Romania-France broadcast on June 9th (final result: 0-0). The first half of the match had 2,664,000 viewers in average (market share: 58,9%), and the second achieved 2,971,000 viewers (share: 57,8%) - target all urban, GfK peoplemeter data. The ratings are remarkable following the continuous drop in audience of the public television during the last year. TVR 1, the first channel of the public television, fell to the 4th or 5th place in terms of monthly averages, virtually equal to the audience of the main rolling news television in Romania, Realitatea TV. The traditional position on the market of TVR1 was the 3rd place, after the leading commercial stations, Pro TV and Antena 1.

Romania-France ratings on June 9th. Source: GfK data processed by TVR

Other matches such as Holland-Italy or Sweden-Greece, broadcast by TVR 1, also acheived good ratings.

According to some voices on the market, the drop in audience is due to the management change. Tudor Giurgiu, an independent filmmaker, had been appointed as a president-director general of the public television after the elections in December 2004, but he quit during the summer of 2007, following a scandal related to the high expenses of the public television and losses at the end of the year. The Parliament has appointed in his place Alexandru Sassu, a member of the social-democrats (PSD), which resigned after several weeks, in order to achieve at least a formally independent status. Independent productions, which had been promoted by Giurgiu as a means to boost public television’s employees’ creativity and efficiency, were cut from TVR 1 and TVR 2’s schedule.

No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI