Letter from Czech Republic
By Raymond Johnston
23-08-2013
The broadcast TV landscape in the Czech Republic continues to expand. Two new digital channels aimed at niche audiences have been launched by the commercial market leaders since the beginning of the year, and two smaller music channels launching this summer. Public broadcaster Czech Television is also looking at launching new channels before the end of the year.
Long-time market leader Central European Media Enterprises (CME) – operator of TV Nova – launched Telka at the end of February 2013. The channel relies heavily on material from the Nova archive, which CME characterises as the “best content ever created for a TV screen.”
The expansion helped the Nova group achieve its most successful month since November 2011. Altogether, Nova group’s five free-to-air channels in April garnered a 42.87% primetime share of the 15 –54 demographic.
In an interview with Czech daily Mlada Fronta Dnes, TV Nova’s general director Jan Andruško said more channels are planned for the group “fairly soon” as part of its long-term strategy to address market fragmentation that has been occurring since the digital broadcast spectrum opened up in 2008. He declined to give details.
Telka is the third free-to-air digital channel that CME has brought to the Czech market in the past year. It joins Smíchov, a comedy-orientated station that began in December 2012, and Fanda, a male-oriented station with sports, movies and erotic content launched in July 2012. These three new channels each have less than 2% audience share.
Rival commercial broadcaster Prima, run by Sweden’s Modern Times Group, also expanded this year by adding Prima Zoom at the start of February. It focuses on documentaries primarily of interest to males over 35. Prima now has four FTA channels in its group, accounting for 22.55% of 15–54s in primetime. Prima does not have any more new stations on the horizon but says upgrades to its main channel Prima Family and its female-oriented channel Prima Love are planned.
Public broadcaster Czech Television, celebrating its 60th anniversary, is also making room on the digital spectrum for two new channels, launch in August. CT:D is aimed at children, while CT Art is culture-orientated. The public broadcaster began digital broadcasting in high definition on May 1 on three of its four channels, CT1, CT2 and CT Sport. Its all-news channel CT24 remains in standard definition only. The four channels had a 22.59% primetime share in April.
Even the smaller niche broadcasters are beginning to diversify. Czech music station Óčko has been broadcasting digitally since mid-2012 and has been available over the internet and cable since 2002. At the start of June it launched Óčko Gold, with a playlist of 1960s to 1990s hits from Czech artists, as well as international acts like ABBA, Tina Turner and Bon Jovi. Óčko has a third channel with urban music programming.
Despite all the new avenues, programming remains stagnant. Nova’s medical-themed primetime soap opera Ordinace v růžové zahradě 2 (Rose Garden Medical Clinic 2) has been dominating the ratings since 2008 and had a 43.44% share in April. To build on its success, Nova premiered a new spin-off medical series at the end of June. Doktoři z Počátků (Doctors at the Start) is made by the same creative team responsible for Rose Garden Medical Clinic, and Nova has ordered 32 episodes. Martin Stránský, who played surgeon Ota Kovář in Rose Garden Medical Clinic 2, will take centre-stage in the new series as a small-town doctor.
Prima is announcing its planned new shows in August. Its new 90-minute celebrity gameshow Máme rádi Česko (I Love My Country) had been its third-highest rated show, with a 19.11 share of the over-15s group in May. The show launched in April, with eight episodes airing on Sundays on Prima Love at 20.15 before a finale at the end of May. It has not yet been announced whether a new series with new teams will return in the autumn. This is the second time the gameshow format from Holland has been presented in the Czech Republic. A version with a different host aired on Nova in 2008.
State-run Czech Television offers the only bright spot. In April, it announced an ambitious €9m production slate of series, miniseries, TV movies and theatrical films. The first of these will air in the autumn. The historical series První Republika (First Republic) will focus on the era between 1918 and 1945, considered the glory years of Czechoslovakia. A modern-day detective series called Clona (Aperture) and eight-part miniseries Škoda lásky (Sad Loves), based on short stories and written by well-known Czech scribes, is also in production.
Launching more and more stations to try to hold on to market share isn’t a new idea. As each of the big Czech TV players launches a distinct channel for young men, young women, older men, older women, children and whatever other group is left, they will just be cutting their own pie into smaller pieces.
The most frequent complaint from viewers is that local productions lack quality and imported series are poorly dubbed by the same voices, with more channels offering more of the same uninspired products. Even Prima’s recent success with I Love My Country was a rehash of a foreign idea that had been made five years earlier.
The big players might do better to spend more money to improve the quality of what they already have. Instead they seem to hope viewers will settle on one of their four or five channels because that is where they landed when they give up searching the dial for something watchable.
