21 May 2015
New figures unveiled today show the BBC has a weekly global audience of 308 million people. This represents the combined measured reach of international BBC content – both news and entertainment – for the year 2014/15 and is the first time this figure has ever been measured in this way.
In 2013 Tony Hall, Director General of the BBC, set a target of 500m for the BBC’s global reach for 2022.
The figures – the BBC Global Audience Measure (GAM) – reveal that the BBC’s weekly global news audience, which is measured each year, has increased by 18m people, or7% since last year, to a record-breaking 283 million. This means that one in every 16 adults around the world uses BBC News.
For the first time, television (148m) overtook radio (133m) as the most popular platform for BBC international news, and it is also the first time since we tracked audiences for all three platforms – radio, TV and online (55m) – in English and 28 other languages – that they’ve all grown in the same year.
The BBC World Service’s audience has increased by 10% in its first year of licence fee funding and now stands at 210m, with the biggest boost coming from new World Service TV news bulletins in languages other than English.
The biggest growth for a single service comes for BBC World Service English, which has its highest ever weekly reach ever with an audience of 52m, an increase of more than 25%. The countries where the audience increases for World Service English have been highest are Nigeria, USA, Pakistan and Tanzania.
BBC Global News Ltd’s audience has grown to 105million with BBC World News TV’s up by 12%, and bbc.com/news growing by 16%.
Fran Unsworth, Director of the BBC World Service Group, said: “These amazing figures demonstrate the importance and impact of the BBC around the world. In times of crisis and in countries lacking media freedom, people around the world turn to the BBC for trusted and accurate information. Thanks to our digital innovation we now have more ways than ever before of reaching our audience – from the Whatsapp Service we set up during the West Africa Ebola outbreak to our pop-up Thai news stream on Facebook following the military coup.”
Tim Davie, Director, Global and CEO, BBC Worldwide, said: “Today’s audience numbers show the global reach of the BBC to be strong and growing. The consumption of branded BBC services across TV, radio and digital platforms speaks to the international appetite for premium content across all the genres for which we are best known – primarily news, but increasingly for drama, factual and entertainment. Having a robust but prudent measurement system in place also helps increase our understanding of our audiences, enabling us to serve them to the very best of our ability in the future.”
Other points of interest are:
- The World Service Group is going from strength to strength in both developed and developing markets, with the single biggest audience for any country in the USA (30m), and with more than a third of the total audience on the African continent (100m), the biggest BBC audience ever seen on any continent.
- Digital innovations from the World Service Group over the past year have included a new Africa livepage on the BBC website; the Thai ‘pop up’ news stream on Facebook; the emergency Ebola service on Whatsapp in West Africa; chat app news services on Line, Mxit, WeChat and WhatsApp; and the move of all 27 language service websites plus News to fully responsive design, which means they can easily be read on mobile phones of all sizes and standards.
Notes to Editors
The Global Audience Measure (GAM) measures the combined reach of the BBC’s international news services – BBC World Service, BBC World News, bbc.com/news and BBC Media Action. It also includes the majority of BBC Worldwide’s BBC-branded direct to consumer services, where measurable and obtainable. It excludes audience for BBC programmes made or sold by BBC Worldwide to third party broadcasters and other platforms.
The BBC’s global news figures were previously measured by the Global Audience Estimate (GAE). This year, these news figures have been combined with BBC Worldwide measured audience figures for the first time.
The GAM shows combined figures, meaning if someone watches both BBC Worldwide content and BBC News, they are only counted once in the total figure. This year’s figures have also been adjusted downwards to avoid double counting people who use multiple devices, eg both a tablet and a smartphone.
Today’s figures include Facebook and YouTube reach for the first time (measuring engaged reach on Facebook which means counting people who interact with our news content.
World Service TV news content is now available in 12 languages. (Source: BBC press release)
21 May 2015
The campaign to secure the release of Peter Greste, Baher Mohamed, Mohamed Fahmy and Abdullah Elshamy has won a major PR Award. The SABRE Awards EMEA, organized by leading PR publication The Holmes Report, gave the #FreeAJStaff campaign a Gold Award for issues management at their annual ceremony in London.
There were 2,000 entries in this year’s competition, which “recognises Superior Achievement in Branding, Reputation and Engagement.” The campaigns were evaluated by a jury of more than 40 industry leaders.
The win comes shortly after the PRWeek Global Awards gave Al Jazeera ‘Highly Commended’ recognition in their Crisis & Issues category for the same campaign.
Both judging panels looked at how the situation went from being a story about journalists arrested in Egypt, to being the biggest press freedom campaign in the history of the news media. The campaign was also nominated by the Middle East PR Association earlier this year.
Mostefa Souag, acting director general of Al Jazeera Media Network expressed his gratitude:
“This recognition from the PR industry is extremely humbling. We were faced with a grave situation and this campaign rose to the challenge. This campaign has had everything: the cultivation of a hashtag that went viral; scores of events in all the continents of the world; extremely nimble and effective crisis communications; the gathering together of the entire news industry; and support from world leaders. All of this was in the noble cause of supporting press freedom.”
Abdulla AlNajjar, Executive Director of Global Brand and Communications, thanked everyone involved in the campaign:
“Congratulations are due to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been involved in #FreeAJStaff from right around the world. What’s kept us going is the vision of securing freedom for our guys who sacrificed much for the sake of journalism and fulfilling the public’s right to know. A lot of stamina has been needed to keep this going. We will not stop until the right verdict has been reached and justice has also been served for those convicted in absentia.”
Elshamy was arrested by Egyptian forces in August 2013. He was released in June 2014 after he went on hunger strike to protest his imprisonment without charge.
Greste, Mohamed and Fahmy were arrested on 29th December 2013, and were incarcerated for more than 400 days. They were convicted in June 2014 after a trial that prompted outrage across the world. The verdict was thrown out on appeal, with Mohamed and Fahmy released on bail in February 2015 before a retrial which is ongoing. Greste was deported that same month on presidential order. The campaign for their release prompted Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to say he wished that the whole thing had not happened, and he promised to release the journalists if the courts didn’t.
21 May 2015
The public can explore the worlds of journalism, news, current affairs and documentaries at Al Jazeera’s first café opened in May in Doha, capital of Qatar, home to Al Jazeera Media Network.
Located in Katara, at Building 4 on Shakespeare Street, the innovative new concept is at the centre of Doha’s fast developing cultural area. The cafe gives visitors an exclusive look inside broadcast media while they can also enjoy a range of fresh organic dishes.
As well as boasting a suitably international menu for one of the world’s leading media organisations, the cafe features an interactive studio where members of the public can take away videos of themselves reading from a teleprompter on an Al Jazeera set.
AIB CEO Simon Spanswick tried out the studio (pictured left) during a visit to Doha and Al Jazeera Media Network at the beginning of June. “This is a great initiative,” says Spanswick. “It brings Al Jazeera closer to its audience with a truly hands-on experience. Visitors have travelled from across the Gulf region to visit the Cafe during its first couple of weeks of operation, trying their hand at news reading and weather presenting, as well as sampling the cuisine.”
At the entrance to the cafe is a selection of historic artefacts from the Qatar-based Network, including some of its first broadcasting equipment from 1996 and equipment damaged in attacks on the Kabul and Baghdad bureaux in 2001 and 2003 (picture, right).
The cafe itself boasts a smart contemporary design for its multiple zones. Menus are loaded on tablets while a range of flat screens show the network’s TV channels and digital properties, keeping patrons up to date with news from around the world.
Abdulla Alnajjar, Executive Director for Global Brand and Communications at Al Jazeera said:
“What we’re offering here is an experience that makes people feel part of Al Jazeera, the Al Jazeera team and the Al Jazeera environment. The cafe is a hub for conversation, debate and sharing of ideas and opinions. People have always felt part of Al Jazeera, and most recently this has chiefly meant engaging with us online. The cafe fuses together our modern connections with the traditional idea of the coffee house as a centre of community.
“A lot of thought has gone into the design, the interaction, and the menu. We hope that the public will like it, and we look forward to the conversation.”
Al Jazeera Cafe is open to the public and can be followed on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at #aljazeeracafe
#aljazeeracafe
20 May 2015
SES (NYSE Euronext Paris and Luxembourg Stock Exchange: SESG) announced today that it will be broadcasting Europe’s first free-to-air Ultra HD channel via Astra 19.2 degrees East. The German shopping channel, pearl.tv, will be produced and broadcast in native Ultra HD as of September 2015.
The parent company of pearl.tv, Enstyle GmbH, will lease additional capacity to launch the new channel and will also contract SES Platform Services, a subsidiary of SES, to manage the technical operations of the Ultra HD broadcast. Pearl.tv will also continue to broadcast in SD and HD.
“Years ago, pearl.tv was the first shopping channel to broadcast its programme in native HD. Today, by being the first to launch pearl.tv in Ultra HD, we are once again demonstrating our strength as technological leaders in the European media industry. We will also be producing and broadcasting pearl.tv in native Ultra HD from a brand new studio,” said Dr Michael Sichler, Managing Director of Enstyle GmbH.
“SES has been at the forefront of Ultra HD developments since 2011. Our satellites can deliver a truly immersive Ultra HD experience, because satellites are the only infrastructure capable of distributing native Ultra HD in extremely high quality throughout Europe to millions of TV homes,” said Ferdinand Kayser, Chief Commercial Officer of SES. “We are proud that we will be working together with our partner to achieve the next Ultra HD milestone and broadcast Europe’s first commercial free-to-air Ultra HD channel to the 18 million direct-to-home households we serve in Germany today.” (Source: SES press release)
19 May 2015
On April 23, 2015, nionex GmbH merged with the Bertelsmann corporate partner arvato Systems S4M GmbH. In the future, the two companies will have a joint market presence as arvato Systems and offer their customers seamlessly integrated digital communications services, from conception to international roll-out.
The two Bertelsmann companies nionex and arvato Systems have been working closely together on a variety of projects since the end of last year. Customers are offered consolidated efficient solutions for digitization and support from experts for digital transformation. As a logical next step of this successful cooperation, the arvato Systems group subsidiary arvato Systems S4M GmbH was merged with nionex GmbH.
“This will formalize our proven cooperation and position our organization on a solid foundation. At the same time we are strengthening our integrated brand image,“ adds Ralf Schürmann, CEO of arvato Systems S4M GmbH. “The extensive professional partnership will develop into a joint company in which we will further combine our industry expertise for improved response to the needs of our customers.”
Both the established contact persons as well as the company locations will remain unchanged. The resulting opportunity to also use arvato Systems locations such as Hamburg, Munich or Cologne will enable even closer customer relations on a local level. (Source: arvato Systems press release)
www.arvato-systems.com
19 May 2015
Current Time, a TV news program for Russian-speaking audiences in countries bordering Russia, launched its new weekend edition with shows affording viewers a fresh alternative to Russian-controlled TV.
Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) share the mic on Current Time’s daily show Monday through Friday, and now will serve up weekend programs, with VOA hosting Current Time Week In Review (Настоящее время. Итоги) on Saturdays and RFE/RL taking charge of the Sunday program, Current Time This Week (Настоящее время. Неделя).
“We are expanding our efforts to bring independent, factual and compelling reporting to audiences that have little alternative to official Russian media,” said Nenad Pejic, RFE/RL Editor-in-Chief.
“The balanced and responsible discussion on Current Time is in marked contrast to the Kremlin’s aggressive media empire that denies an outlet for opposition alternatives and public debate,” added VOA Director David Ensor.
“For Moscow it is very important now to keep the victorious posture,” Dmitry Oreshkin told VOA’s Yulia Savchenko, host of the Saturday edition of Current Time. Oreshkin heads an independent Moscow-based political research group. “The Russian propaganda narrative is that America got scared of us,” he said. Other highlights from the inaugural Saturday program included coverage of the Kerry-Lavrov talks in Sochi, the issue of Ukraine’s future in NATO, and the latest diplomatic moves between Russia and China.
The first Sunday program, anchored by RFE/RL’s Sergey Dorofeyev, looked at Boris Nemtsov’s posthumously published report on Russian military involvement in Ukraine, the tenth anniversary of the Andijon massacre in Uzbekistan, and the trial of Nadya Savchenko in Moscow. The program included an exclusive interview with the Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel Valentin Fedichev of Ukraine’s Anti-Terrorist Operation, who noted that, “Ukraine is facing well-organized Russian military aggression in the East.”
“With Current Time, our networks are offering audiences professional, independent journalism that they cannot get elsewhere. This includes reporting from the front lines, but also regional and global issues that receive little coverage on official channels,” said BBG Interim CEO and Director André Mendes.
Current Time is carried by more than 10 public and private affiliate channels in Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine, and is available to Russian speakers everywhere on digital platforms, including social media. Drawing on a network of reporters in the region, across Russia, and in European capitals and the U.S., it presents a daily, 30-minute mix of live news coverage, interviews, original features, and political satire. The show is one part of the U.S. government’s efforts to respond to Russian propaganda in the region. (Source: BBG press release)
