Reality TV still a hit

Survivor contestants fend for themselves in the outback

Reality TV has had a "huge impact" on global broadcasting, with Big Brother spin-offs sweeping world television, an industry fair has heard.

Paris-based Eurodata TV said at the MIP TV trade fair at Cannes on Tuesday that Big Brother and Survivor were among the top 10 shows in five countries.

And Jacques Braun, head of Mediametrie, Eurodata's parent company said reality programming had "created a new broadcasting langugage".

He said hybrid shows, blending reality and fiction are springing up everywhere.

A UK Big Brother computer game spun off from the show

"Though the production frenzy is over, new concepts are emerging to use the grammar set by Big Brother," he said

He pointed to The Netherlands, where Big Brother originated, as the "formats lab" for such reality TV shows.

Eurodata analyses the TV usage and favourite programmes of 1.2bn TV viewers in 64 countries to come up with these results.

The UK has had two successful series of Big Brother - one with members of the public, and one with Celebrities raising cash for Comic Relief.

Since the success of Big Brother, spin-off formats have swept world television.

In the US and Canada the competition and adventure of the gameshow Survivor, was a huge hit for CBS.

The winner of the US reality TV show Survivor

Contestants battled it out to be last one left on a desert island for a $1m (£675,000) prize.

Some 45 million Americans watched the second edition of Survivor, broadcast immediately after the Superbowl - climax of the US football season - in January 2001.

A grueling military-style training camp is the setting for the latest reality TV programme to air in the US.

Meanwhile Expedition Robinson, an Indiana Jones-style version of Survivor, made a "conspicuous appearance" in Swedish and Argentinean charts.

Fiction programmes - TV soaps, telenovellas, sit-coms and features - are still what attract most watchers, but in 2000 one entertainment show has "jostled" ratings for major fiction shows.

Millionaire is the only entertainment programme to threaten fiction ratings

Eurodata says this is due to the "dizzying" success of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Millionaire - which in 1999 was a ratings hit in only Canada, Denmark, Britain and the USA - has since swept through Western and Central Europe and the Middle East.

The fair also heard that the world watched more TV last year than ever before, some 208 minutes per day per person, seven minutes more than in 1999.

In Western Europe, Italy is the country where people watch TV the most at an average of 3 hours and 50 minutes per day.

And the Japanese are the TV addicts of Asia, turning in for more than four hours a day.

While in the US average TV viewing hits four hours and 20 minutes a day.