Well, it's got to be said that there are few big surprises in the freely available channel data from BARB. Sky Sports 1 raised its rating again this week to 2.6 share, based mainly on two big football matches on Sunday and Tuesday, the Tuesday game rating a staggering 2.24 million viewers, and the Sunday game fairly close behind on 1.83 million viewers, both of which are staggering ratings for programmes on multi channel channels. The Tuesday game, which was a Premiership match featuring Arsenal and Manchester United, topped the previous weeks clash between Chelsea and Manchester United in the Carling Cup, which got 1.93 million viewers.
The Premiership match is the highest rating multi-channel programme of the year, and the best performer since an October 2004 edition of Super Sunday managed to achieve a massive 2.86 million viewers. Since then, 4 other editions of Super Sunday have managed to achieve more than 2 million viewers. Outside of sport, the next best performer has been Sky One's The Simpson?s, which has managed almost 1.5 million viewers during that same period. It now seems that with programmes fairly regularly topping the 1 million mark, and with a few now topping two million on a slightly more irregular basis, that 2 million viewers is now the "Gold Standard" for multi-channel programmes. This week 3 programmes beat the 1 million viewer mark, one of which as I stated, topping two million. Two more shows were just shy of the million mark.
In other developments, ABC1 manages to hit 0.2 share for the second time this year, whilst Hallmark seems be sliding, down to 0.8 share. Sky News takes the lead back in the News channel stakes (0.6 to 0.5), but is resoundingly beaten by its sister channel, Sky Sports News (0.8). Boomerang, Cartoon network's classic cartoon channel has managed a 2005 high of 0.7 share, which is very credible. This week, 5 channels couldn't make the 100k mark in terms of Weekly Reach. These were Sky Travel Shop, London TV, Teletext Holidays, TWC Reloaded and You TV. The worst performer of those 5 was TWC Reloaded, which only managed to reach 3,000 viewers during the week, mainly due to a change in broadcast hours.
