Ukrainian viewers used to the same old fare on television may have been surprised to turn on their television sets in March and discover that a new channel had joined the fray on channel 52.
One hundred percent Ukrainian-owned, the new channel bore the name New Channel, a moniker its managers say was chosen to emphasize a program menu of conceptually daring entertainment heretofore unseen on the Ukrainian market.
After a few months of sharing frequency with the STB channel, the National Council for Radio and Television granted the New Channel the right to broadcast on Channel 52.
Today, the New Channel broadcasts for about 17 hours a day. Its zone of coverage extends from Kyiv into other districts of Kyiv Oblast, potentially reaching five million viewers. Management plans to expand coverage into other major Ukrainian cities and eventually to broadcast nationally.
'So far we are developing rapidly,' said Petro Konov, the head of New Channel's promotion and sales department. 'And we see no obstacles in the way of expanding into the rest of Ukraine.'
What development it has done thus far has been without the benefit of advertising revenues. Konov said the channel's work has not been affected by the lack of financing, however.
For now the finances of an anonymous investor have been enough to equip the company with its brand new studio, newly renovated offices, and state-of-the-art equipment.
Andry Kulikov, chief editor of the New Channel, said it is not the channel's money, but the channel's programming that sets it apart from the rest. 'We tell the viewer what the others don't tell him, not what he already knows,' Kulikov said.
The program's news broadcasts are particularly dedicated to that creed, Kulikov said. To avoid dull, run-of-the-mill news broadcasts, the New Channel does not provide its announcers with text, and licenses them to opine and comment freely as they report on events.
'It is not an attempt to escape competition, but to provide an alternative to news reports,' Kulikov said.
Kulikov limits the length of the channel's news reports to five to fifteen minutes. But the reports run as frequently as nine times a day.
The channel has also shunned the conventional Ukrainian wisdom that broadcasts should be conducted in only one language. Announcers at the New Channel freely convert from speaking Russian to speaking Ukrainian and vice-versa, depending on the interviewee.
Kulikov said that flexibility is necessary to maintain a dialogue with all types of customers through the network's frequent listener call-in programs.
Looking toward the future, the New Channel is planning to diversify its entertainment programming. Kulikov expects that will be done both by improving its home-produced material and selectively purchasing the rights to movies and syndicated foreign programs.
The new channel joins a Ukrainian television market still very much in its infancy. Ukrainians have only four national channels to choose from, plus a handful of regional channels, the number of which varies by region.
Studio 1+1, which broadcasts for much of the day and evening on state channel UT-1, has long topped the popularity ratings, with another national channel, the Inter channel, coming in second. Both of those channels use a different formula than the New Channel.
The Inter channel mostly rebroadcasts programs from Moscow's ORT channel. Well-heeled Studio 1+1 uses its riches to buy popular but expensive American programs like Melrose Place and the X-Files, supplemented by an impressive menu of big-name movies.
The two state-owned channels, UT-1 and UT-2, have been around the longest and own the best broadcast infrastructure. But they wallow at the bottom of the ratings thanks to a steady diet of Soviet-style documentaries and entertainment programming said to induce nausea.
Only about eight percent of Ukrainians subscribe to cable, compared to 50 percent in neighboring Poland.
Those who do have a little more to choose from. The Russian ORT, RTR and NTV channels, known for more hard-hitting news analysis than the Ukrainian channels, are especially popular among cable subscribers.
'There is much more money spent on the development of television in Russia,' Konov said, explaining the reasons for the popularity of Russian television channels. Billionaire Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky has a known interest in ORT, while other stations get funding from other oligarchs.
