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Over the past twenty years, Russian television has come a long way: from the strict censorship and ideological rigidity of late Soviet times and the almost anarchic freedom of the 1990s to the current situation, characterized by qualitative and stylistic diversity, the use of mainly licensed content and the targeting of specific audiences.
In the mid-1980s, only two national television channels were available throughout the entire Soviet Union. They were supplemented by regional channels in every national republic as well as in some of the bigger cities. Despite the emergence of about a dozen national channels requiring only an antenna and scores of channels broadcast via cable, satellite or the Internet, those two Soviet-era channels are still around. Today they are known as Channel One and Rossiya. Both controlled by the government, they are losing audiences to more specialized channels, demonstrating one of the most notable trends in domestic television over the past few years.
“As recent figures show, the three channels aimed at the widest audiences [Channel One, Rossiya and NTV] are becoming less and less popular, losing their share of the audience to channels focusing on more specific audience groups,” said Andrei Slepchenko, senior project manager at COMCON RI Qualitatif, a Moscow-based research company.
“In the last two years, for example, the highest growth in the TV industry was achieved by STS and TNT, two channels that are targeting specifically younger audiences and are therefore focused on entertainment,” he said. “Channels for very specific audiences have been formed in the last few years, such as Domashny, which is targeting primarily housewives and stay-at-home moms, and RBK-TV, which is targeting businesspeople, not to mention all those small niche channels in the area of pay TV.”
According to Slepchenko, this trend is likely to continue in the near future, especially as more small, specialized channels emerge covering a wide range of subjects from fishing to classic films. Such channels can experiment with content more easily than state-run channels since they are not constrained by huge advertising contracts.
At the moment, however, Rossiya and Channel One still top the list of domestic channels in terms of audience share, with 22.1 and 21.5 percent, respectively. NTV is in third place with 11.7 percent of the available audience, according to data from Moscow-based TNS Gallup Media.
Rossiya and Channel One also continue to dominate the list of highest-rated shows. In the first nine months of 2006, three Rossiya programs were among Russia’s most watched shows: the most popular show of 2006 was Tantsy so Zvezdami (Dancing with the Stars), a figure skating competition modeled on a show of the same name on American channel ABC; it was followed by the 12-part series Gromovy, the story of the difficulties faced by a large Russian family during the Soviet era; and Rossiya also claimed the fourth place show, an adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel V Kruge Pervom (The First Circle).
Channel One claimed four of the top-10 slots with its series Grozovye Vorota (Thunderstorm Gates), Two Fates Part III, Sila Uboynaya (Killer Force) Ofitsery (Officers); two of the channel’s music and variety shows hosted by Maxim Galkin also made the list.
While Channel One and Rossiya are still watched by older and more conservative audiences who began watching them in the Soviet era, many younger and more sophisticated audiences switched to NTV when it was formed in 1993. This channel, however, has seen a substantial decline in its audience share following a takeover by state-controlled natural gas monopoly Gazprom five years ago.
Nevertheless, it maintains third place in national television market share. While trying to cover the widest possible audiences, the channel’s current focus is largely on crime and detective shows. Its most popular show is Chistoserdechnoye priznaniye (Frank Confession), a weekly police documentary show, followed by the investigative series Professiya - Reportyor (Reporter’s Job).
STS calls itself “the first entertainment channel,” and it closely follows NTV in terms of audience size. It is the only channel outside Channel One and
Rossiya to make the list of top 10 shows with its series Ne Rodis Krasivoy (Don’t Be Born Beautiful), a romantic comedy.
TNT is another Russian channel primarily focused on entertainment, but, unlike its major rival STS, it actively targets younger audiences. The channel’s specialty is reality shows, including the popular Dom-2 (House-2), which has been on the air for more than two and a half years. Originally conceived as a competition in which 24 young people live together in a house and build another one, which would then be awarded as a prize to the best couple formed over the course of the show, the program has stayed on the air far longer than was initially planned.
Smaller channels with a national reach, such as REN-TV, TVC and TV-3Ñwith audience shares of 3.8, 2.9 and 2.6 percent, respectively - broadcast in a format that is divided between news and entertainment, but all three have recently shifted programming more towards entertainment in order to compete with bigger channels.
In an attempt to attract younger audiences, TVC and REN-TV both upgraded their logos earlier this fall, conducted advertisement campaigns and announced changes in their programming. In addition to TNT and STS, the smaller channels also face competition for younger viewers from the two national music channels, Muz-TV and MTV-Russia.
Incidentally, neither music channel ranks in the top 10 nationally, losing out to two state-sponsored niche channels, Culture and Sport.
Currently, precise statistics are not available on the proportion of domestic content compared with licensed foreign content shown on Russian TV channels. Many internationally successful shows, such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, The Weakest Link, and Star Academy, have been adapted for the Russian audiences, primarily by the bigger channels.
“Channels are more eager to make local versions of shows that have already been successfully tested elsewhere rather than come up with their own content, since their financial risks are very high and they don’t want to disappoint advertisers,” Slepchenko observed, adding that some domestic shows that have been on the air for decades are being pushed out of primetime slots in favor of foreign imports.
The best example of this is KVN (The Club of Cheerful and Smart People), a comedy show in which student teams compete by giving funny answers to questions, making improvisations and presenting prepared sketches. The show, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, is still on the air, but in a much less favored timeslot than it once had.
According to Slepchenko, one solution for channels that don’t want to take the risk of introducing entirely new shows but at the same time are suffering from a crisis of ideas, could be to make amendments to licensed content, such as Channel One did with Dancing with the Stars when it replaced dancing with figure skating - a sport that has been extremely popular with domestic Russian audiences for decades. Incidentally, the U.S channel Fox stole that idea back to produce their own “Skating with the Stars.”
Additionally, more and more channels are producing their own domestic sitcoms and soap operas consisting of more than 100 episodes. Although made in Russia and not directly imitating any foreign equivalents, these shows are hardly standard domestic content, since the concepts behind a long-running show were completely new to domestic audiences.
In a reversal of a 1990s trend, the highest-rated feature films shown on television in recent years have been domestic movies, such as last year’s box office champion 9 Rota (The 9th Company) or the screen adaptation of Boris Akunin’s bestselling novel Turetsky Gambit (Turkish Gambit).
Although the Russian television scene is still dominated by state-run behemoths, newer channels producing their own content are increasing their market share and across the board, locally relevant, domestic content is what people are tuning in to see, bringing a diversity into Russian television that was missing in the early post-Soviet years.
By Vladimir Kozlov
Special to Russia Profile
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