SBS Offers the Most Variety of Programs

Among the three television stations in Korea, SBS airs the most diverse genres of programs.

The “Analysis Report on the Broadcasting Program Variety” released Tuesday by the Korean Broadcasting Commission (KBC) indexed the variety of the three broadcasters’ programming based on the results of this year’s autumn programs. The variety of programming signifies the range of program genres that viewers can select. It was indexed from 0 to 1 and the greater the figure indicates the greater variety.

For the overall programming, SBS turned out to have the greatest score of 0.85 followed by MBC and KBS2 whose score are both 0.83. KBS1 lagged behind all of the other stations, scoring only 0.78. For the weekday programming, both KBS1 and MBC had the highest score with 0.77. And for weekend programming, KBS1 recorded 0.83 and SBS had 0.80. If the index is over 0.80, it indicates that the variety of programming is at a considerably high level.

The main genres of the three stations are news (18.6 percent), living information (15.8 percent), variety shows (14.2 percent), and dramas (13.3 percent).

The main genres of KBS1 are news (25.5 percent), documentaries (16.2 percent) and living information (15.8 percent); the main genres of KBS2 are dramas (18.4 percent), variety shows (16.4 percent), and living information (13.5 percent); the main genres of MBC are news (23.8 percent), variety shows (17.7 percent) and dramas (13.2 percent); the main genres of SBS are living information (21.8 percent), variety shows (14.3 percent) and dramas (13.2 percent)

The program genres are classified into 15 categories such as news, talk shows, and comedy, according to the programming classification table of the KBC made in 1993.

Advanced nations, including the United States and Japan, utilized such an index for the variety of programming as a guideline to evaluate broadcasting stations. KBC said, “Having a variety of programming is a good way to serve the public interests. We recommend television stations to have a more diverse range of programs.”

kathycho@donga.com