After the U.S., the European market is the world’s second largest TV market and one of the cornerstones of the international television business, generating billions of dollars in revenue, spending a few billion more for acquisitions and creating thousands of hours of programming every year. Yet few people grasp the actual scope of the region’s TV industry. Perhaps the confusion about the labels “Western,” “Central” and “Eastern Europe” make it difficult to delineate its exact borders. Or maybe the confusion stems from the agonizingly bureaucratic European media-gathering organizations (which receive public European Union, EU funds, but are skilled in staying off the radar, lest the public realize how useless they are), or the fact that, until recently, there was no centralized database providing easy access to facts about the size, nature and history of the business in various European countries. Fortunately, a tool has come along to help answer questions like: How many TV channels are there in Europe, who are the leading broadcasters and how fast is digital TV catching on across the continent? All the stats on TV in Europe that one could hope for are now available in a single online database. The database, known as Mavise (www.mavise.obs.coe.int), was set up by the Strasbourg, France-based, European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO) at the request of the EU’s European Commission. Founded in 1992, the EUfinanced EAO is an organization dedicated to gathering, archiving and distributing information about the audiovisual industry in Europe. Mavise contains searchable statistics (gathered in 2007) on the TV industries of all 27 countries of the EU as well as two candidate countries (Croatia and Turkey), throughout which there are 23 official languages. This includes information on thousands of channels and audience figures care of — as it is officially noted — French audience measurement institute Médiamétrie (which, despite its presence at various TV markets like MIP-TV, is a mysterious organization toVideoAge ). Also available are facts on the history of TV in each country. The archive will be updated in 2011, and periodically thereafter. In all, Mavise reports that there are 6,500 TV channels in Europe, of which 5,068 are said to be “active.” That number refers to stations that program individual channels (therefore no channel repeaters V I D E O • A G E MA R C H/ AP R I L 2 0 0 9 40 Channel Hopping in Europe Survey Reveals the Growth of TV Networks on the Old Continent F a s t - F o r w a r d Mavise also lists the number of channels based on their genre. Below is a sampling: General: 376 Movies: 333 Sports: 324 Entertainment: 269 Music: 238 News and Financial: 201 Children: 189 Documentaries: 135 Lifestyle: 110 Shopping: 103 Cultural/educational: 69 Travel and vacation: 26 Another of Mavise’s helpful features is that it provides the breakdown of terrestrial, cable and satellite channels across Europe. An overview of these figures follows: 4,663 channels are based in the 27 EU countries and the two candidate countries. 404 channels are located in non-EU European countries. The 4,663 EU channels are divided into 381 national terrestrial networks and 2,473 cable, satellite and IPTV channels. Of these, 656 cover more than one country. One thousand eight hundred and nine are regional and local channels. Germany Population: 82,218,000 Household with TVs: 39,981,000 Households with digital TV: 15,460,000 Number of channels based in the country (broadcast and satellite): 398 Biggest broadcaster (in terms of audience share): ProsiebenSat1 Leading pay-TV provider: Kabel Deutschland, 9.5 million subscribers TV ad revenues per year: $13.2 billion* U.K. Population: 60,975,000 Households with TVs: 26,500,000 Households with digital TV: 21,983,000 Number of channels based in the country (broadcast and satellite): 940 Biggest broadcaster: BBC Leading pay-TV provider: Virgin Media, 3 million subscribers TV ad revenues per year: $14.7 billion France Population: 63,753,000 Households with TVs: 26,495,000 Households with digital TV: 20, 810,000 Number of channels based in the country (broadcast and satellite): 438 Leading pay-TV provider: Canal+, 10.5 million subscribers Biggest broadcaster: Not provided by the Mavise report. TV ad revenues per year: $9.8 billion Italy Population: 59,131,000 Households with TVs: 23,907,000 Households with digital TV: 6,300,000 Number of channels based in the country (broadcast and satellite): 382 Biggest broadcasters: RAI (public) and Mediaset (private) Leading pay-TV provider: Sky Italia, 4.6 million subscribers TV ad revenues per year: $8.8 billion Spain Population: 45,283,000 Households with TVs: 15,919,000 Households with digital TV: 12,178,000 Number of channels based in the country (broadcast and satellite): 379 Biggest broadcaster: Telecinco Leading pay-TV provider: Sogecable, 2.08 million subscribers TV ad revenues per year: $2.72 billion *Information on TV ad revenues gathered from sources other than Mavise. are included), and encompasses broadcast, satellite and cable channels. The site examines three aspects of each channel: key data about the channels themselves, information about the different audiences, and data concerning companies’ finances (extracted from an international database consisting of trade documents). Though it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the wealth of data on Mavise, another useful aspect of the site is that it facilitates a comparison of the markets of different countries and illuminates continent-wide trends. For example, one of the most notable developments across Europe is the declining viewership of free terrestrial TV channels as a result of the proliferation of other television options. The following is an overview of television statistics from the five European countries with the largest TV audiences and biggest markets: Germany, the U.K, France, Italy and Spain. Of those five, Germany has the highest number of total TV households and constitutes Europe’s largest market. However, some of the smaller countries, including Italy, have a higher ratio of TV households to population, making them equally important. ES
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