The first article written on the reputation that each TV network has in Yerevan was pretty politicized. The society is not aware of this yet. Meanwhile a group of parliamentarians are discussing the recent speech made by the head of the national TV network. Probably the reason is that all fields are politicized more than they should be. Definitely it would be better first to understand what kind of impact articles like this can have on national TV. The TV reputation and monitoring system has been applied starting from August, 2005. This program is implemented in Armenia by IREX/Armenia organization and the project was proposed in December of last year. Now this organization has the results of their research for all broadcasting and TV companies and is providing them free of charge. The first part of the results is very interesting.
First of all it was surprising both for Armenian and foreign specialists that we don’t watch TV that much. Only 55-60% of Armenians watch television and the rest spend their day doing other things. The next surprising thing is that there is not one leader in this market. There are a lot of networks that have intimate ties with the most popular TV channels. One of the reasons for this is the fact that we don’t watch TV much. On January 22, the national TV network was broadcasting the well known concert in Moscow. If the results of the TV monitoring of IREX/Armenia were not published, we would think that most of Yerevan citizens were enjoying the concert in the comfort of their homes. But according to this monitoring the number of citizens who actually watched this concert was less than 20% of TV viewers. According to the same information no other TV program has had such a big audience so far. Whether this is good or not, that is a different story. To have a program with high reputation still doesn’t mean to have a program of high quality. Everyone knows that the best (or the best quality) items are not sold best. There have been a lot of books that were considered to be the best selling books but didn’t remain for all time. In other words the more programs are popular the more we don’t know how good they are. And there is no need to prove that Brazilian soap operas are the most popular ones. We can assume that the other programs that have the same moral and quality level are subject to becoming that much popular too. In order to not hurt Armenian TV networks, let’s bring up examples of Russia. It has already been three years since Russia has TV monitoring. Before autumn 2004, the “Rossia” TV channel, which is one of the leading national TV networks, bought about 250 documentary movies. Of course they had made contracts with the companies providing those films beforehand. But when purchasing those movies the monitoring group found out that society preferred watching entertaining programs and shows more than documentary movies. And we know what happened later: a lot of programs were shown on different Russian channels that were very much similar. And those documentary movies were moved to evening hours when people watch TV less. The situation is still the same. The “First channel” of Russia has a program named “Russia 2030”, which is shown at nights. Both students and adults participate in this program. This is a typical market solution: children participate in preparing a program which is shown when they are already asleep. And it is evident that TV reputation makes the networks move the serious programs to evening hours and thus showing fun programs and music. Of course developed countries have some mechanisms on preventing this. These countries that give some resources to private companies in parallel to this they make them do some work to recover losses. TV networks can’t make their broadcast boring for people by showing programs planned for advertisement. So lets bring an example from Russia again. When broadcasting a soap opera, the “Rossia” TV network decided not to interrupt it by showing advertisements. And when the financiers of the TV channel made calculations, it turned out that as a result of this they had lost almost 5 million dollars. But on the other hand, the TV channel increased its reputation. And if it is possible to compare the reputation with money we can assume that sooner or later they will get that money back. The problem is whether our society can apply a mechanism that will not allow the reputation ranking method be decisive in the Armenian TV market. Otherwise “ALM” TV channel, with its reputation going down, will have to show Aram Asatryan, Spitakci Hayko and others instead of showing the talented kids, whom the network likes to call “diamonds”…