Channel 5’s first full week of ratings has now been made public and Elstein and his crew have nothing to celebrate.Mrs Doubtfire is its biggest ratings winner to date, attracting 2,849,000 consolidated viewers. Indeed, the evening film is proving to be the channel’s most popular slot; My Step Mother Is An Alien recorded 1,694,000 viewers… Continue reading Channel 5 Ratings Round-Up
The Swedish minister for social affairs, Margot Wallstroem, has promised to oppose an important preliminary ruling of the European Court of Justice which threatened the country’s state monopoly over the retail sales of alcoholic beverages. “No matter what the [ultimate] verdict of the European Court of Justice (which is expected in the next couple of… Continue reading SWE: Promise to oppose the ECJ
Jessica Larive MEP, the European Parliament Rapporteur on the Green Paper on Commercial Communication, has completed her report. It judges that the “internal market for commercial communications is not presently functioning in a satisfactory manner, as 99 per cent of those consulted providing commercial communication services identified potential trade barriers linked to disparity in national… Continue reading EU: Larive Report Finalised
The Distilled Spirits Council of the US (DISCUS) has sent a letter to President Bill Clinton, asking him to bring together the broadcasting and alcoholic beverage industries, in order to develop and agree a common code of practice for alcohol advertising. The move comes in the context of Clinton’s recent pressure on spirits’ producers to… Continue reading US: Clinton Urged To Take Action
Speaking at the MRG conference on Friday, Peter Bowman, media research director at WCRS, called for a change to the National Readership Survey. He said that the survey was not as robust as the research for the TV industry. BARB, he argued, provides a meaningful currency while NRS seems only to be used for things… Continue reading Changes Urged For NRS
The European Commission hosted a conference on 7/9 April in Bonn, part of a project launched by the G7 Ministerial Conference on the Global Information Society in February 1995 in Brussels. The Bonn conference was held to discuss the development of a global business information network and electronic commerce for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).… Continue reading EU: SME Conference
David Brennan, vice president of research at Flextech, spoke about digital TV and said that there was a general feeling of “so what?” among the public and the industry. Despite this, together with a general fear of new technology, he predicted that there would be a take-up of 5 million households by 2003.Brennan also predicted… Continue reading MRG Conference Report – Second Day
On 16 April the Conciliation Committee achieved a compromise on the amendments proposed by the European Parliament in its second reading of the Television Without Frontiers (TWF) Directive (89/552). The most significant referred to two key topics: the requirement for public broadcasters in the EU to guarantee access to the public to major sports events;… Continue reading EU: Compromise on TWF Directive
A new control authority has been born: the Broadcasting Standards Commission will replace the Broadcasting Standards Council and the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, and will encompass both those bodies’ functions. The BSC is required to produce a code of good practice on fairness and privacy; it will publish regular monthly reports of decisions on complaints from… Continue reading UK: New body emerges
Quality Market Among the quality titles the Sunday Telegraph continues to perform well and in the period October ’96-March ’97, it showed the largest year on year increase at 30.15% to 863,147 copies sold. Its sister daily paper also had a good growth in sales, with an increase of almost 7% to 1.117 million. The… Continue reading National Press Round-Up – March ABCs
