Reality television dominates Finnish TV offering

Ministry of Transport and Communications
Publication date 11.7.2013 12.55
News item

A survey on television offering commissioned by the Ministry of Transport and Communications was made known through Minister Pia Viitanen on 11th of July.

According to the survey, the biggest single programme genre of Finnish free TV channels consists of reality shows. Foreign fiction receives the second biggest slice of the programming time, the third being entertainment and light music. For the first time, reality TV was investigated as its own particular program genre.

The aim of the reports concerning Finnish television offering is to provide a quantifiable overview about the programming of Finnish TV channels and their total offering. The report investigated national free TV channels Yle TV1, Yle TV2, Yle Fem, Yle Teema, MTV3, Sub, Ava, Nelonen, JIM, Liv, The Voice/Kutonen, TV5, SuomiTV and Fox. The data is based on a 5-week sample, which was collected during the weeks 8, 16, 33, 42 and 51.

Based on the sample, the total programme offering of free channels in 2012 amounted to an average of 1354 hours per week or 193 programme hours per day. On a weekly level, the total programme offering of the channels increased by 135 hours when compared to the year 2011, which can be explained mainly by changes in the channel spectrum. Ava became a free national basic channel, and Fox replaced SuomiTV.

Even though the amount of cost-free programming offered increased as a whole, many of the old channels reduced their transmissions. The hourly offering was reduced by all Yle channels as well as by MTV3 and Sub. On the other hand, the amount of programming available in the cost-free channels of Nelonen Media, that is, in Nelonen, in Liv and in Jim, increased. The amount of programming offered by TV5 and Kutonen remained nearly unchanged.