Identifying and ranking the factors that affect the audience decline of Iranian State TV

The state TV of the Islamic Republic of Iran for achieving its objectives needs to attract audience. This media, that once was the main media item in the media basket of Iranian TV audience, now is suffering from a kind of stagnation. Such crisis affecting country’s most popular media have inspired the conducting of this research work to identify and categorize the elements responsible for decline of audience of Iranian State TV. In order to find out the responsible factors behind such crisis, this research work, by help of the literature and principles of research works and based on three- branch model has classified these factors in three areas of “Content”, “Structure” and “Context”. Then, in order to analyze these factors, the sample under the study was selected in a random manner and the role of the factors in decline of audience was measured through questionnaires and finally 386 questionnaires were completed and analyzed by SPSS software. The most important “content” factors that were identified include weak content of programs and lack of sufficient use of celebrities. Other factors such as monopoly nature of TV and its geographical complexity as a structural factor and emergence of new rivals and change of people’s life style as contextual factor were also determined as responsible elements for audience decline.  Results of this study show that structural factor has the greatest role on audience decline and content and contextual factors, rank second and third responsible factors respectively with slight difference, for decline of the audience of Iranian state TV