Ratings Review: BARB Week Ending 30th September 2007

Well, we have some very interesting and unusual news from the latest publically released ratings figures from BARB.

It was during this week that ITV2 premiered The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, a series that seemingly is not going to air on ITV1 for a while yet. At the moment, this commission seems to be exclusive to ITV2. Everybody wondered how high or low the ratings would be. Now, we can reveal all...

1,997,000 viewers.

Just 3,000 shy of the 2 million mark.

Not surprisingly, this, along with another million plus rating for an X-Factor episode, saw ITV2 gain a 2.2 share / 33.1 reach for the week. Huge numbers.

In other ratings news, Sky One is back above the 1% share mark with a 1.1 / 16.3. Decent numbers for the channel, and a marked improvement on the recent downward trend. IT was helped by the fact that the top 3 shows on the channel all scored over half a million, with a new episode of The Simpsons scoring 750,000. And for a change, the new Prison Break season scored in the top 10 finally, coming in at Number 2. Other than that and Premier League All Stars at Number 9, every other spot is taken by The Simpsons. Improvement, yes, but still, a long way to go, in order for Sky One to reclaim the top spot in digital TV.

Time for the regular "Hall Of Shame". This week, the channels that have performed the worst, are, in no particular order...

Sky Travel Shop - 93,000
Sky Arts - 135,000
Anime Central - 123,000
Baby TV - 157,000
Business Channel - 65,000
Community Channel - 146,000
Film 24 - 76,000
Golf Channel - 167,000
Legal TV - 162,000
Life One - 114,000
MusFlash - 29,000
MUTV - 93,000
Overseas Property TV - 81,000
Rockworld TV - 85,000
Setanta Golf - 166,000
Simply TV - 28,000
The Baby Channel - 52,000
The Travel Channel - 190,000
The Travel Channel +1 - 142,000
Wedding TV - 154,000
Wedding TV +1 - 156,000
XLeague.TV - 106,000

No surprise, yet again, Simply TV, simply is the bottom rung of the televisual ladder.

Not that the likes of Wedding TV have any real cause for celebration. It says a lot when your timeshift channel does better than the main channel.

And finally, it has to be said that the first two weeks of Nuts TV have been spectacularly low, even though they have managed to avoid entry into the Hall Of Shame, so far. 298,000 and 377,000 viewers respectively, are not great numbers for a channel that broadcasts on Freeview. Perhaps Turner Broadcasting, who surprise suprise, are the registered owners of Nuts TV, should be looking for other options.

Ratings Review: BARB 5th June 2007

I haven't been following the ratings too much recently, but I do notice in the latest publicly available figures on the BARB website, some very interesting stats.

It is noticeable that Sky One has lost a lot of ground and is now pulling in it's lowest viewing figures ever. Just a 1.1 share / 15.7 weekly reach. It is even more noticeable, that whilst Sky Three has a lower share than Sky One (0.7), the weekly reach figures are better (17.9). Obviously the Sky vs Virgin Media incident is doing Sky One a great deal of damage.

In terms of share of viewing this week, Sky One is now behind the likes of BBC Three (1.2), CBeebies (1.2), E4 (1.2), ITV3 (1.4), ITV2 (1.8) and Sky Sports 1 (2.4). Sky One has never fallen this low and it remains to be seen just what will be done, particularly in regards to Sky Three's prescence on Freeview and the Sky / Virgin Media situation.

Now, for the worst performers of the week. These channels rate so low on share that it's between 0 and 0.1, so we rank them by weekly reach instead. The worst of the worst is Setanta Sports 2, which only broadcasts on Saturdays and Sundays, in a similar way to Sky Sports 2's early years. They rank just 29,000 viewers this week. Then comes MUTV (48,000), The Business Channel (50,000), Legal TV (90,000) and Rockworld TV (92,000).

Setanta may be making a big deal out of the fact that they have Premiership Football from August, but their current ratings are incredibly low. In fact, Setanta Sports 1, which now broadcasts on both Sky and Digital Terrestrial (note: Digital Terrestrial, not Freeview, as you have to pay a subscription), only gets 205,000 viewers per week, and doesn't score high enough on the share of viewing table to get a 0.1, but does at least avoid a complete 0. Out of all the Sports channels that we can track on the BARB ratings, only the Golf Channel UK comes in with a worse performance than Setanta Sports 1 (159,000) and the next worst above Setanta Sports 1 is the now defunkt Prem Plus, which scored 252,000 for one of the last matches they ever showed. Setanta Sports have their work cut out.

DigitalTV.com

The biggest revolution in broadcasting history since the birth of commercial television began in the UK in 1997 with the launch of digital television.

More channels and more choice were promised to the viewer. Today, in 2001, we see that digital has brought us more channels to choose from, but they are not all successful.

The Money Channel has had some well-reported financial problems. Simply Money was simply losing money and relaunched itself as a shopping channel.

Some of the Asian-language services have gone from subscription to free to air and back again in order to tempt subscribers to their services.

Add to that the reports that some programmes on the major digital channels such as BBC Choice, E4 and ITV2 have had no viewers at all, and you can see that the digital channel revolution has suffered similar problems to the dot com revolution.

But why? Simply, there are so many channels and services out there fighting for your attention and viewing time but not enough hours in the week, never mind a day, to view them all.

Plus, the services are as diverse as they come with channels all about fashion, computer games, health, dance music and extreme sports, mixed in with the more traditional multi-channel fare of entertainment, news, movies, sports, pop music and classic television programmes.

With so many new channels coming on stream almost on a weekly basis, it is quite easy to forget that before the digital era, several analogue satellite and cable channels also found the going somewhat tough.

Country Music Television, The Weather Channel and The Family Channel, amongst others, all had difficulty getting their services accepted by enough viewers to make running a channel worthwhile. Even Sky with their deep pockets had troubles with The Comedy Channel, Sky 2 and Sky Sports Gold in the pre-digital era.

But these and other quite high profile difficulties haven't put off the television companies who have launched new channel after new channel or brought existing channels to Sky Digital.

Okay, you say, so satellite and digital channels have had some problems, but what's that got to do with dotcoms? Well, the parallels between the dotcom revolution of the late 1990s and the multi-channel revolution that began in 1997 are quite astounding.

The dotcom revolution saw a massive increase in the number of online shopping websites, a rise that was not supported by an equivalent rise in the number of online consumers.

In the same way, the expansion in the number of channels available to the viewing audience has not been reciprocated by a similar increase in the number of households able to view these digital channels.

Therefore, there will be a point when the number of channels will be so large that the viewing audience and the advertising market will be unable to support them all.

To a small extent we have seen that already, but with the continued expansion of channels, it will not be long before this particular bubble does what the dotcom bubble did and bursts, leading to a number of quite high profile channel failures right across the spectrum of digital channels

We all know that 2000 was the year when the dotcoms began meeting with their logical conclusion, leaving a lot of casualties in their wake. 2001 has seen the first few failures of the digital TV revolution.

Could the next year see the bursting of this bubble? The only people who can decide that are the ordinary people in the street.

Will you watch the programmes on these new channels, and buy the products advertised on them or will you just stick with the channels and programmes you know and love?

Now, for the first time since September 1955, the future of television is back in the hands of the viewers and advertisers.