Program guide

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The program guide is a general-interest magazine with the main task of providing information about the television and radio programs.

The broadcasters' offers are listed on special program pages. In Germany it is customary for each transmitter to be assigned a specific place. In other countries there are also TV magazines that sort programs only by time. Many television magazines expanded their spectrum from around the 1990s and also offered information on cinema, computers, books, DVDs and music.

Since the success of smartphones and tablet computers around 2010, more and more people have been using these devices, mostly advertising-financed program guide apps . These apps represent a new generation of program guides with numerous extensions and multimedia elements. Tapping on a program in the station list opens detailed information on this program. Because apps are not subject to printing restrictions, their content is usually larger.

The magazine "Die Sendung" (1928)

The first German program magazines emerged with the beginning of broadcasting . From around 1926 a federal broadcasting structure with ten stations emerged in the German Reich, all of which published their own program magazines in 1932, such as the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkzeitung SRZ or the Mirag , NORAG and WERAG of the Mitteldeutsche, Norddeutsche and Westdeutsche Sender AGs.

Forms of distribution, typification and target groups

Program guides are assigned to different groups depending on the publisher and revenue model - here are the four most important:

  • Classic sales magazines with kiosk and subscription sales as program guides in the narrower sense
  • Cross-object, advertising-financed program supplements for daily newspapers
  • Advertising papers or customer magazines with program information as the main focus
  • Programs of individual channels in free or revenue-based distribution

The classic retail magazines form three further sub-categories according to their publication frequency (weekly, fortnightly, monthly), each of which serves different target groups and depicts specific editorial concepts.

As the oldest sub-genre, the weekly program magazines have a significantly higher proportion of women and a consistently older readership than the fortnightly magazines, which were only introduced for target groups in the early 1990s: extreme examples in Germany are, for example, the weekly titles two (79.3 percent women) and Auf a look (53.4 percent of readers 60 years and older) in contrast to fortnightly TV digital (women 39.9 percent, 60-plus-share 11.0 percent) or the TV feature films that have been released since 1990 (47.0 percent Percent women, 13.4 percent 60 plus).

The typical founding phase of the monthly program magazines as the third and youngest sub-genre is from the year 2000. Titles such as TV pur or Nur TV differ from the extensive additional editorial content of the biweekly competitors through their restriction to the pure program data and an aggressive distribution price. At the end of February 2012, DWDL.de attested that the monthly program guides had a sharp decline in reliability towards the end.

Market and class range

With 34 TV guides appearing worldwide, Germany is the market with the largest selection: in the USA there is only one national TV guide , Great Britain has eight, France and the Netherlands 13 each. In relation to the number of inhabitants, there are eight magazines in Switzerland, while Austria has only one magazine ( TV-Media ).

In Germany, program guides with a net category reach of more than 41 million readers are the segment with the greatest reach in the media analysis 2008, followed by “Current Magazines” (31.54 million) and women's magazines (27.99 million). Overall, the purchased titles of the program guides reach 63.3 percent of the population. The total circulation per publication interval is around 18 million copies.

Although every second German has a program guide, complex, expensive titles are not accepted by the German market. There are also no advertisements for monthly cheap magazines. All established magazines come from the publishers Bauer, Springer, Gong and Burda. All other new releases had to give up, for example TV49 at the beginning of 2009. While Hörzu and At a Glance have continuously been losing circulation since the 1990s and TV Movie and TV Spielfilm have also suffered a decrease in circulation since the mid-2000s , TV4Wochen and tvtop are read more frequently.

Market leading titles and providers

Number of weekly program guides sold
Number of fortnightly program guides sold

The best-selling German program guide is tv14 with an average circulation of 2.33 million copies ( IVW quarter IV / 2007). TV Digital followed with 1.99 million circulation, while TV Movie came in third with 1.83 million.

The market is dominated by four publishers: Bauer Verlagsgruppe (market share in the fourth quarter of 2007 after circulation 48.0 percent), Axel Springer Verlag (21.7 percent), Burda Verlag (19.5 percent) and Gong Verlag (10.9 percent ).

Electronic journals

For the computer, there are special TV magazine programs like that of Hörzu displaced TVgenial that of TV Digital displaced tvDIGITAL OnGuide , Texxas , as well as from TV Movie Clickfinder and the open-source project TV-Browser . While TVgenial offers more pictures, the free version of the program only contains a few channels, the full program is only available in the paid version. TV-Browser contains most of the channels, but only some of the pictures.

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: TV program guide  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See also Second Screen - the habit of using a smartphone or tablet while watching TV
  2. ↑ That was one of the first German radio magazines, published by Verlag Hermann Reckendorf from April 1924. Reckendorf himself was considered too progressive by the National Socialists and he was also a Jew. He lost the publishing house in 1933.
  3. ↑ See history of radio, 10 stations in the empire
  4. ↑ Media analysis press I 2008
  5. ↑ Uwe Mantel: Systematic Errors: From the nonsense of the 4-weekly TV magazines in DWDL.de
  6. ↑ As of June 2009, cf. journalist 6/2009, p. 47 ff.
  7. ^ "The market for TV guides ", Bauer Media KG, March 2008
  8. ↑ Media Analysis Press I 2008, also journalist 6/2009, p. 47 ff.
  9. ↑ No market for new ones ...: journalist 6/2009, p. 47 ff.
  10. ↑ IVW IV / 2007
  11. ↑ Calculation according to the Bauer publishing group based on IVW IV / 2007