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bbcrussian.com, 02 september 2003
The first Russian business television to broadcast business news day and night has been launched. In the country under noticeable economic recovery and the market's growth, the idea of creating a business television seems to come natural but skeptics believe it is a bit premature. RBC TV, an offspring of the Russian consulting and news agency RosBusinessConsulting, will broadcast 24 hours a day, of which 16 hours live. RBC has been a path-breaker from the very outset. The company became the first among its sector peers to go public. The launch of the business television has been thoroughly prepared: the channel was operating in test mode for almost a year before beginning to broadcast, and this is an extremely long period for Russian media.
The project costs about $23m, of which $13m were provided by private, mainly German, investors, and the rest by the RBC parent company's own funds. RBC TV hopes to break even in a couple of years. The principal source of RBC TV incomes is advertising business-oriented goods and services. So far the channel has been doing well. According to a source in the company, 85 percent of the advertising time was sold long before the channel started broadcasting. The management of the company estimates the potential audience at one tenth of Russia's population that accounts for one third of aggregate incomes of the country. There are, however, several reasons that question RBC prospects of immediately becoming a counterpart of Bloomberg, a US-based independent business television.
The first problem is purely technical. TV programs will be relaid by means of two cable channels and two satellites. According to experts, the programs will be accessible to as little as half a million TV viewers in Russia. Skeptics within the company itself are of the opinion that at the beginning RBC TV's active audience is hardly to exceed 50,000. Moreover, even if RBC TV can broadcast nationwide it will not be able to find millions of viewers interested in the dynamics of US stock indices.
In spite of the fact that since the beginning of this year the Russian stock market has grown almost 50 percent in dollar terms, Russian citizens still prefer to keep their savings at home. The pace of the Russian stock market is being set by a dozen oil and energy companies, and trade is led by a couple of major speculators. Bond or stock investments are so far unpopular. The banking sector is still not reformed. Only 20 percent of respondents that took part in a poll conducted by one Moscow radio station are ready to take a bank load, and not from their friends. Growth in the real estate market of large cities is slackened by expensiveness and other difficulties with borrowing real estate on mortgage.
It seems as if an around-the-clock business television channel cannot find sufficient demand in Russia. However, it may happen that in this case the supply will trigger the demand. In the early 1990s, Kommersant, the first Russian business newspaper, was launched. At that time, it also seemed as if the newspaper would have no audience and no future. Ten years later, Kommersant, still owned by fugitive Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, is one of the most popular newspapers in Russia. In a sense, the newspaper molded its reader, a representative of the Russian upper-middle class, by itself. It is quite possible that having seized the primitive soil of Russian business broadcasting, RBC TV will wait until it finds its viewer or form its viewer by itself.
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