Radio still tops with German-speaking Swiss

The German-speaking Swiss spend more time listening to the radio than watching television. Figures just out show they listen for an average of three hours and 20 minutes each day, compared to two hours and 17 minutes spent in front of the small screen.

The German-speaking Swiss spend more time listening to the radio than watching television. Audience research figures just out show they listen for an average of three hours and 20 minutes each day, compared to two hours and 17 minutes spent in front of the small screen.

The German-speakers’ love-affair with the radio, over and above television, is not repeated in the rest of Switzerland. Radio is still very popular in the Italian and French-speaking regions, but at around two hours and 41 minutes (French) and two hours and 50 minutes (Italian) both linguistic groups spend just about as much time sitting in front of the TV as they do tuning into the radio.

Television viewing figures are on the increase across the whole of the country. In 1999, the Swiss spent on average five minutes more each day watching television than they had the previous year.

Retired people, and not children, came out tops in the average amount of time they spent in front of the box. While those aged 65-plus from German-speaking Switzerland watched a daily average of three and a half hours’ TV, those from the French-speaking region spent four hours and 24 minutes.

The figures were published by the audience research unit of SRG-SSR Idée Suisse (the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation). The share of the market held by publicly-funded channels fell slightly in all language regions.

swissinfo with agencies