A bit later in the week than I usually post these, but here we go with another review of the latest publically released BARB ratings.
First thing I'm going to talk about is Setanta, as I have noticed in the various internet forums there seems to be a growing amount of bad feeling towards Setanta from certain quarters, especially those who are fans of Sky and Fox. Yet to look at the figures from the latest BARB survey, Setanta are not doing badly in the SCL (Sports Channel League)! The following figures are the weekly reach ratings for the various sports channels as listed on the BARB survey.
Sky Sports News - 6,762,000 / 13.5%
Sky Sports 1 - 6,433,000 / 12.9%
Sky Sports 2 - 2,325,000 / 4.7%
Sky Sports 3 - 1,830,000 / 3.7%
Setanta Sports 1 - 1,529,000 / 3.1%
Sky Sports Extra - 1,260,000 / 2.5%
Eurosport - 1,113,000 / 2.2%
Setanta Sports News - 1,022,000 / 2.0%
Eurosport 2 - 667,000 / 1.3%
attheraces - 534,000 / 1.1%
ESPN - 455,000 / 0.9%
Extreme Sports Channel - 291,000 / 0.6%
Setanta Sports 2 - 283,000 / 0.6%
Setanta Golf - 174,000 / 0.3%
TWC - 138,000 / 0.3%
In other news, Channel 4 +1 continues to be the most popular timeshift channel, at least 0.2% ahead of any other timeshift, and guess which is the next most popular? E4 +1.
More 4 has gained a rating of over 10 million viewers this week, and a share of viewing of 1.0% which is very impressive. It was helped in no small mearsure by replays of "Come Dine With Me" scoring well over 500,000 each, and a Thursday night episode of ER which scored a massive 1.028 million viewers. Other channels to score over 1 million viewers for programmes included BBC Three, on a Tuesday night repeat of Eastenders, together with the 60 Seconds update before it, and two Carling Cup midweek matches and one Super Sunday premiership match, all shown on Sky Sports 1.
At the other end of the scale, some of the recent channel openings on Sky Digital have been very unsuccessful, much more so than Setanta Sports News. Diva, which launched back in October, only scored a weekly reach of 239,000 viewers. FX +1 has only scored 303,000 viewers, whilst Luxe.TV scores a pathetic 16,000 viewers. The Africa Channel doesn't do much better, scoring 39,000 viewers whilst SA Direct scores a mere 100,000 viewers. And some people have said that the launch of Setanta Sports News was a failure! Compared to these stations, over 1 million viewers a week looks positively healthy.
Whilst Luxe.TV's 16,000 viewers is bad, one channel has done worse. Anime Central only manages to pull in a pathetic 8,000 viewers this week. And that's not for any one programme, but for the WHOLE channel. In digital channel terms, that is a failing grade. Must do better.
