Finland

During the last years newspaper advertising declined due to decreasing subscriptions whereas television viewing rose and television advertising through commercial Oy Mainos MTV and PTV cable-television is accounting for still increasing advertising revenues. Especially commercial channel MTV3 has increased its advertising revenues over the last five years whereas public broadcaster Yleisradio Oy YLE's revenues remained rather flat because it is mainly financed by the licence fee. According to 1993's Yleisradio Oy Law, use of advertising as a factor of providing finance for the two public channels YLE TV1 and YLE TV2 is only allowed in exceptional cases. Public channel's advertising revenues in 1995 were $ 60 million, commercial channel's $ 200 million.

Sanoma Corporation is Finland's biggest newspaper group with two newspaper titles and nearly 30% of the daily circulation. It has also interest in the electronic media field, its subsidiary Helsinki Media being the majority shareholder of cable channel PTV. PTV is also looking for an operating licence for nationwide commercial television.

Earlier this year a three-year National Multimedia Programme was launched by leading Finnish media and telecommunication companies. It is intended to build up an infrastructure for the provision of multimedia services, to create these services an to hold user trials. The project is also welcomed by the Finnish Government as it is looking to further develop the Finnish information society. At the beginning of 1996 there were some 300000 Internet-users in Finland, compared with a population of about 5 million.

Commercial channel MTV3 has become Europe's first broadcaster to introduce 24-hour broadcasts on the Internet. The MTV Internet TV channel is a joint venture with Telecom Finland. Programming will mainly come from MTV3 but also seperately produced programmes are planned. The channel also broadcasts programmes from British news channel ITN.

© November 1996 by Jens Barkemeyer