Intermedia Duplications:
Television and Radio Program Types

Television and radio are media which are broadcast to the population.  Anyone who has a television (or a radio) may be able to receive many different channels programmed to play different types of programs.  Naturally, a person will chose the program types that they prefer, so that a study of these media preference patterns may reveal a lot about these people.

Television and radio compete against each other for a place in the time budget of people.  They are not always direct competitors, since there may be circumstances under which only one (and not the other) is available.  For example, more than half of all radio listening takes place out of the home, of which in-car listening takes up a significant portion.  Clearly, when one is driving, it is inadvisable to watching a soccer game on a little television screen at the same time whereas radio is well-appreciated as a diversion, especially when one is stuck in a traffic jam.

To the extent that many people are duals users of television and radio, it would be logical that their personal tastes should remain consistent across the media.  Thus, we would expect a sport fan to look for sport events on television as well as on radio, just as we would expect a news addict to look everywhere for news.

We will now cite some data from the TGI Brasil study released in early 2001.  A total of 5,312 Brazilians between the ages of 12 and 64 years old were asked about the television programs that they watch most frequently and the radio programs that they listen to most frequently.  Following the maxim "a picture tells more than a thousand words," we present the correspondence map of the relationship between television and radio program types.

In this map, the red squares represent radio program types while the blue circles represent television program types.  When two red squares are close to each other, it means that people who listen to one radio program type also listen to the other one.  For example, on the left-hand far end of the map, we see that 'Sports: Commentary' and 'Sports: Live' tend to be listened to by the same set of people.  Similarly, when two blue circles are close to each other, it means that people who watch one television program type also watch the other one.  Again, on the left-hand far end of the map, we see that 'Sports: Commentaries', 'Sports: News', 'Sports: Live' and 'Extreme sports' are watched by the same set of people.  Finally, loosely speaking, blue circles that are close to red squares can be thought of being program types that are either watched or listened to by the same group of people.  For example, on the far left, we have a heavy concentration of sports programs on both media, and this reflects the behavior of people who can be called 'sports fans'. 

The rest of the correspondence map contains some fairly obvious groupings.  

• The left-hand portion of the correspondence map is for sports fans (sports news, commentary, live broadcasts)
• The top central portion of the correspondence map tends to show news and information program types (news, documentaries, business & finance, traffic, nature, science/technology)
• The right-upper portion of the map corresponds to art/cultural programs (classical music, jazz/blues, theater, musicals, opera)
• The right-hand portion of the map contains women-oriented programs (novelas, fashion, cooking, home decoration)
• The lower central portion of the correspondence map is for entertainment programs (music, movies, dramas)

(posted by Roland Soong, 5/15/2001)

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