Measuring the Concentration of Audience for Television and Video On-line

The most classical indicator for measuring concentration of the TV audience market is the TV national audience daily market share, calculated over a given period (most frequently one year). In most of the European countries (with the exception of Luxembourg and Malta) the data are calculated by national audience measurement institutes, using the methodology of sampling and measuring by peoplemeter. Yearly data are communicated, channel by channel, to the European Audiovisual Observatory by Eurodata-TV, the international service of the French institute Médiamétrie. Based on
our knowledge of ownership (through the database MAVISE, the database AMADEUS and information provided by national sources), we have calculated the 2011 national daily audience market shares of the various groups. There is no legal European definition of a TV group, but there is no great difficulty in identifying groups through the analysis of ownership structure, which is in general well documented.1 We have then calculated the combined audiences in 2011 of the four leading groups by
country (table 1) and also calculated the daily audience market shares in 2011 of the leading groups
in Europe in each of the markets where their channels are available.