London Agence France Presse 15 May 2006 Record numbers of radio listeners are tuning into the BBC World Service, the public broadcaster said on Monday.
The service is attracting an average of 163 million listeners per week to its 33 language services during 2006, up from 149 million last year. The new high beats a previous weekly record high of 153 million listeners, achieved in 2001, the British Broadcasting Corporation said. The rise comes despite the BBC axing 10 of its foreign language radio services in October last year, largely in former Communist Europe. Global weekly audiences for the service's English language broadcasts have risen to 42 million listeners from 39 million in 2005. Audience figures are significantly up in Nigeria, Indonesia, Kenya, India and Nepal, the BBC said. Recent political unrest in Nepal has pushed the number of listeners up to 3.7 million from 2.6 million last year. "This record-breaking audience is an outstanding achievement against the background of fierce competition, fast-developing technology and rapidly changing audience demands in many media markets," BBC World Service director Nigel Chapman said. "The challenges ahead for BBC World Service remain formidable, as they do for all broadcasters, but this is a strong and welcome indication that we are not only strengthening our impact in priority areas but are flourishing in the multimedia age." Two countries registering significant falls, however, are Bangladesh and Pakistan. Audience numbers in Bangladesh dived by 4.4 million to 8.6 million, blamed on a lack of FM frequency in the country. During the past six months the World Service has closed its language services in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Slovak, Slovene, Kazakh and Thai. Cost savings are being used to fund an Arabic television news channel, set for launch in 2007. It will be the BBC's first publicly funded global television service. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/208358/1/.html ---[Start Commercial]--------------------- World Radio TV Handbook 2006 is out. Order yours from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0823059367/hardcoredxcom/ ---[End Commercial]----------------------- ________________________________________ Hard-Core-DX mailing list [email protected] http://arizona.hard-core-dx.com/mailman/listinfo/hard-core-dx http://www.hard-core-dx.com/ _______________________________________________ THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/dsl.html
