Development of the TV market

date: 02.05.2007

In the recent years after the BNT’s monopoly over the national air broadcasting, the TV market in Bulgaria has established a firm status quo. The three national TV channels BNT, bTV and NTV have distributed the major part of the audience between them together with the advertising revenues. Unable to compete with the market leaders, the regional air and cable operators had to content themselves with a smaller in volume peripheral audience that the national televisions had not mobilized. This divided the TV market in two portions. On the one side we have the national channels which in their frantic competition keep producing a growing number of reality shows and non-traditional news emissions. Far behind them, with audiences that are considerably smaller in volume, the regional air and cable channels are fighting for their survival.

One of the main reasons why the status quo is so vital is the closed regime of issuing national licenses. After the national televisions have increased from one to three, the procedure for issuing new licenses had been postponed several times until, on 13 June 2006, the Communications Regulation Commission decided to discontinue the process with the argument that a sufficient frequency capacity should be saved for the forthcoming television digitalization. Thus the market was practically monopolized by the three national televisions which have gained a huge commercial advantage thanks to their large-scale coverage. According to end-2006 data 29,3% of the respondents said they use air TV broadcasting, 62,3% - cable and 6,2% - satellite. With their access to larger audiences, the national TV channels generate higher advertising revenues, which enable them to implement larger budgets programme able to attract even the users of the cable channels. This regulative rigidity of the TV market is an important factor for the long-term lack of new capital outside the leading trio of the national televisions. The impossibility to combine the need for large investments that could maintain the competitiveness and the lower return capacity through advertising have doomed the remaining channels to fighting not so much for larger audiences but for remaining on the market in the first place.