The Discovery Channel is the number one Media Brand in Overall Quality for the tenth consecutive year, and the number one Television Network Brand in Overall Quality for the fourteenth consecutive year according to the 2006 EquiTrend; brand study by Harris Interactive.
In addition, the number of high quality Discovery Communications brands in the study exceeds all other media companies. This year, nine Discovery brands rank among the top 25 media brands, and nine rank among the top 25 TV brands. Also making a strong showing, Discovery Channel Stores ranked ninth among the top retail merchandise brands.
Discovery also had the most online brands of any media company ranked in the top 25 for quality, including the websites for the Discovery Channel, which made a strong debut at the number one spot, and Discovery.com at #3, moving up two places from last year. The websites for TLC, Discovery Health Channel, Animal Planet and the Travel Channel were also ranked in the top 25 for online quality.
"The results of this survey validate Discovery's commitment to providing consumers with the highest quality entertainment in the world and underscore our mission to be a trusted and valued source of information," said Judith A. McHale, president and chief executive officer, Discovery Communications, Inc. "It is an incredible honor for the Discovery Channel to be continuously recognized as the top media brand for quality and reinforces our belief that there is great interest in the groundbreaking, knowledge-filled programming that Discovery provides."
The 2006 EquiTrend;study is a brand quality-perception study conducted online once yearly by Harris Interactive among 25,666 consumers, ages 15 and older where each consumer rated 80 brands and each brand received approximately 1,275 ratings. This latest survey was conducted within the U.S. between March 7 and 16, 2006. Figures for age, sex, race, education, income, presence of children (under 18 years old) in the household, and geographic region were weighted to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online.
With pure probability samples, with 100 percent response rates, it is possible to calculate the probability that the sampling error (but not other sources of error) is not greater than some number. With a pure probability sample of 25,666 one could say with a ninety-five percent probability that the results have a sampling error of +/-1 percentage point, and for a sample of 1,275 the sampling error would be +/-3 percentage points. However that does not take other sources of error into account. The online survey was not based on probability sample and therefore no theoretical sampling error can be calculated.
Discovery Communications, Inc. is the leading global real-world media company with operations in 170 countries and territories reaching 1.4 billion cumulative subscribers.
