Drama is way more popular than news on television, according to a survey by the Broadcasting Authority.

The authority said today that according to its audience assessment for October 2015,  the average amount of hours that TV viewers spent watching television reached 1.98hrs every day, an increase of 5.4 minutes over in the previous assessment during July 2015 and slightly lower than the two hours registered  in October 2014.

An average of 191,200 persons, or 49.3% of the population aged 12 years and over, stated that they had listened to radio in October, while an average of 240,800 persons [62.2%] followed at least one TV station during this month.

Data was collected by the National Statistics Office.

TVM remained  the most popular station with 39.1% followed by ONE [14.9%] and Net TV [8.7%]. Overall 65.4% of all viewers followed a local station while the other 34.5% followed a foreign station with Canale 5 [5.7%], Rai 1 [4.8%] and Italia 1 [4.1%] being the most popular stations.

As in other previous surveys, TV audiences tended to peak between 7:30pm and 10:00pm

TV programme preferences

The study also investigated the most popular television programmes as indicated by respondents. A total of 96 programmes were named by respondents. Drama programmes were the most popular with 55.4% of all preferences followed by news [20.2%], and discussion programmes [3.1%].

Out of all the programmes mentioned by respondents TVM obtained 70.3% of all counts, followed by ONE with 13.8% and Net TV with 13.2%.

The three most quoted programmes were: Katrina on TVM [15.9%], Iċ-Ċaqqufa [TVM, 13.8%] and TVM News [TVM; 11.6%].

The top ten programmes most quoted constituted 78.6% of all preferences.

Radio audiences

Bay Radio remained the most popular station with 24.9% of all radio listeners followed by ONE Radio [14.9%] and Radju Malta [11.5%]. Bay Radio was popular with those under the age of 50 whereas ONE Radio was popular with those who are above the age of 50.

On average radio listeners spent a total of 2.84hrs each listening to their favourite radio station. This was 0.27hrs [16 minutes] lower than that registered for the same month last year [October 2014]. On a national basis over the whole of the population aged 12 years and over, this amounts to 1.36hrs every person.