A Broadcasting Authority Audience Assessment survey has reported a 5.6% drop in TV audiences in the first quarter.
The authority said that the number of television viewers remained constant over the previous period of October-December 2012 but was 5.629% lower than that registered for the same period the previous year.
Nonetheless, TVM maintained its prime position, increasing the number of viewers over the same broadcasting period of January-March 2011 [36.06% : 38.11%] by 2.05%. The same applied to the other two main local stations with ONE [13.39 : 16.48%] increasing its percentage number of viewers by 3.09% while Net TV [6.80% : 8.0%] increased by 2.8% over the same period last year.
For this broadcasting quarter the three main local stations have all maintained their percentage share over the previous quarter of October-December 2011 with a 0.92% decrease for TVM [Q4-2011: 39.03%], an increase of 0.4% for ONE [Q4-2011: 16.08%], and a 1.17% increase for Net TV [Q4-2011: 6.83%].
The BA said that when "all local stations" and "all foreign stations" are grouped, it could be clearly seen that audiences prefered more local broadcasting stations than foreign stations. However, this was not always constant as total foreign stations sometimes exceeded total local stations especially during the summer months.
The total effective TV hours spent by consumers for this period stood at 2.59 hrs.
As for the number of hours of TV viewing over the whole population, the national average hours of TV viewing was 1.71 hrs every day.
The total number of hours that regular TV viewers spend watching TV programmes increased by 11.6% over the same period last year from 2.32 hrs to 2.59 hrs, and has nearly reached the highest recorded level of 2.66 hrs for January-March 2007.
Of the local stations TVM attained the highest average of 2.652% while ONE TV attained the second overall average of 1.665% of all TV audiences.
TVM attained the highest average audience for each day of the week with the exception of Wednesdays when the highest average of viewers logged on to ONE TV which was also the highest daily average for that station. The highest average attained on any day was that of TVM on Fridays with a total daily average of 3.513%.
By weekday, TVM attracted the highest peaks for all the weekdays having its highest on Tuesdays with 22.755% closely followed by those for Fridays at 21.962%].