Czechs aged 15-69 spend watching four percent of the total time on documentaries.
Czech TV viewers have a choice of around 20 documentary channels, most of which are offered by pay-TV operators. These include Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic and Viasat Nature.
However, only six of the twenty documentary stations are involved in the official electronic measurement of TV viewership and sell their advertising space to the official TV currency - GRP.
"The market for documentary TV stations has gradually filled up over the past decade, as has been the case for other segments of the TV market. A milestone year was 2013, when the free-to-air channels Prima ZOOM and CS Mystery, formerly KinoSvět, entered the market. Until then, only pay-TV channels National Geographic and Spektrum were active on the market. In 2018, CS History, formerly WAR World of Wars, joined the pay documentary stations, and in 2020, the Discovery Channel entered the official electronic measurement of TV viewership," calculates Tatiana Bizovová, who works as a channel account manager at Atmedia.
Similar to sports programmes, documentaries are more sought after by men than women. While men aged 15-69 spend five per cent of their time in front of TV screens on documentaries, women spend three per cent (source: ATO - Nielsen, Live + TS0-3, 2022, ATS, CS 15-69, M 15-69, F 15-69). "As for the viewership of individual documentary stations, this varies, for example, depending on whether the station in question broadcasts in a terrestrial multiplex or whether viewers find it only on pay-TV operators," explains Pavel Müller, head of research and marketing at Atmedia.
For example, the free-to-air TV station Prima ZOOM reaches an average of 2.7 million viewers per month and CS Mystery over 600,000 viewers aged 15-69. The reach of pay documentary stations is then in the hundreds of thousands of viewers, for example National Geographic reaches on average over 400 thousand viewers aged 15-69 per month (source: ATO - Nielsen, Live + TS0-3, 2022, Reach 000, CS 15-69).
For most documentary channels, men aged 25-54 account for around one-third of all viewers aged 15-69, but for some channels the proportion is much higher. An example is the Discovery Channel, which is 70 per cent watched by men aged 25-54. Another roughly one-third of viewers of documentary TV channels are men aged 55-69 (source: ATO - Nielsen, Live + TS0-3, 2022, Profile, k CS 15-69).
Although the programming schedule of the different documentary TV channels varies, it can be seen from the TV ratings results that some topics are popular among TV viewers across the documentary channels. "Viewers of documentary channels often seek out programmes on World War II. Whether these programmes focus on specific battles, historical figures or other topics, they are among the most watched in general," says Pavel Müller.
Source: mam.cz
