Russian TV heavily dominated by national content

Seventy-seven per cent of content broadcast by Russia’s leading TV channels is of Russian origin, with only 6% coming from Europe, according to the latest report from the European Audiovisual Observatory.

There are currently 60 different video-on-demand services operating in Russia, according to the TV Market and Video on Demand in the Russian Federation report, 45% of which deal only with Russian content.

TV channels with Federal coverage, including Channel One, Russia 1, Russia 2, Russia 24, Russia K, NTV, Petersburg – Channel 5, TVC, CTC, Peretz, Domashniy, U, Disney Channel, TV3, MTV, TNT, REN TV, Mir, Zvezda, 2×2 and RBC TV, regularly reach 90% of Russian viewers.

Just over half of VoD services included both national and foreign content. Smart TV is one of the fastest growing distribution platforms, with 50% of all applications offered by smart TV stores being Russian-speaking.

Only 11% of international content on Russian channels in 2012 was premiere content, compared with 43% of national content.

Among leading channels, CTC was the leading distributor of premiere foreign content in 2012, accounting for 32% of the total, followed by TNT with 29% and Ren TV with 15%.

In two areas – feature films and animation – international content accounted for the majority of content on air – 83% in the case of films and 83.4% in the case of animated films and serials.

Fully 99.8% of entertainment programming in 2012 was Russian, as was 96.2% of documentaries and 85.8% of TV series and TV films.

The US accounted for 71% of international content, followed the UK with 6% and France with 5%.