British expatriates have long been comforted by the reassuring tones of BBC World, the corporation’s global 24-hour news channel, but its appeal is broader than that. Last fiscal year, the BBC World brand reached a weekly audience of 233m, a year-on-year increase of 23m. Its biggest competitor, Time Warner’s CNN International, is also a big hitter, reaching 200m households.
Although these stalwarts dominate English language international TV news, fledgeling competitors in the Middle East, France and Russia are making surprising inroads. Al Jazeera English, which celebrated its first birthday last week, is by far the most successful of the latest crop, reaching around 100m households worldwide.
Despite critical acclaim for its high production values, it is yet to crack the hardest nut: America. Although it is available on niche US satellite provider Globe Cast, the big guns like DirecTV and Dish Network still won’t carry it. Part of this is down to technical capacity; high definition (HD) channels – which are popular in America – take up as much as 4.5 times bandwidth as their traditional counterparts and space is getting tight.
Technical issues have been confounded by the Al Jazeera brand’s image problem in America, however. The Qatar-based company says it is one of the most misunderstood brands of recent times; during the early stages of the Iraq war, former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld regularly dismissed its Arabic stablemate as “terror TV”.
The English channel has done much to change its image, however, and if its web presence is anything to go by, there is a market for the brand in North America. Its website – which clocks up around 5m viewers a week – gets around 60% of its users from the US. Similarly, since its launch six months ago, 6.8m videos have been played on its YouTube channel – by far the most popular news channel on the site – with a similar percentage coming from America.
Insiders compare the channel’s fortunes to Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News which – before its launch – was dismissed by many in the chattering classes as “page three television”. Nearly a decade later the channel is admired by opinion formers on all sides of the political divide.
