Earlier this week the Polish public broadcaster chose Andrzej Urbanski as its new president. Succeeding the controversial Bronislaw Wildstein, who vacated the post just over a month ago, he will have the none-too-easy task of mapping out a course for the station.
Despite the fierce competition that exists between the Polish national commercial services Polsat and TVN, both terrestrially and – in a three-way contests with Cyfra+ – the DTH sector, TVP remains the country’s most watched broadcaster. No amount of spin on audience share figures pointing to the successes of Polsat or TVN can get away from the fact that TVP’s first national channel comes in at number one, week in week out. Nor is its second far behind, and when taken together, alongside the regional service TVP3, satellite-delivered TV Polonia and growing number of thematic channels, TVP’s services have a combined audience of between 45-50%.
And yet not all is as it seems at TVP. Although still the market leader, its audience share figures have slowly been falling and it is probably only a matter of time before Polsat or TVN overtake TVP1.
Just as importantly, TVP faces growing competition for ad revenue. According to data produced by TNS OBOP, TVN’s income from commercials this March was 33.3% up on the corresponding month in 2006. However, Polsat whose revenues were up by 13.9%, had the highest total, with TVP1 (+28.2%) and TVP2 (+21.8%) in third and fourth place respectively.
It will be interesting to see what strategy the public broadcaster now adopts. Under Wildstein, TVP gave a debut to a commercial interactive service (iTVP) and was gearing up to launch what would be Poland’s fourth DTH platform, most probably this autumn.
One of Urbanski’s first comments upon his appointment was “a programme (i.e. strategy), rather than person, has been chosen.” It now remains to be seen how this programme develops.
