Ratings Review: BARB Week Ending 14th October 2007 

24 October 2007 tbs.pm/43

Well, the main story in the ratings this week, seems to be one of recovery for Sky One. For the second time in three weeks, the channel has increased its share of viewing, this time going up to 1.2 share / 16.9 weekly reach, which equates to a total of just over 8 million viewers over the course of the week. Despite that, that is still about half a million less viewers than Sky Three, despite it having a lower share (0.7 / 18.0).

However, on the positive side for Sky One is the fact that despite the fact that The Simpsons still had 6 of the Top 10 highest rated programmes, the Top 5 were not dominated by any one show. Noel Edmonds’ new quiz show for Sky One, Are You Smarter Than A 10 Year Old? has for the second week in a row come in at Number 2 in the top 10, with an audience over 600,000. Add to that episodes of Ross Kemp On Gangs, Stargate Atlantis and Prison Break all scoring over the half a million mark, and you’ll see that Sky One has an improving stable of programmes. There’s still work to be done, but there is a good foundation forming.

It’s unfortunate that a lot of the news channels ratings information is not made publically available. In terms of share of viewing and weekly reach, we have ratings for Sky News, BBC News 24 and Fox News, but for individual programmes, only data for Sky News is publically available. For Sky News, their top rated bulletin was a Sunday edition of Sky News at Seven, which just made it over the 100,000 mark! Just out of interest, I wonder just how low the ratings are for Fox News Channel over here. I know they reached only 216,000 viewers this week, but I wonder how that pans out for individual shows. It’s kinda disappointing that BBC News 24 don’t have their indivdual show ratings released. I’d love to do what Inside Cable News and TV Newser do for US cable news channels and release the hour by hour comparison for primetime. That would be truly interesting information. Unfortunately, I think I’d have to be a subscriber to get that info, and that means paying thousands of pounds a year to get it.

There’s a whole load of news channels that do not subscribe to BARB and therefore do not have ratings information collected for them by BARB. CNNI, CNBC Europe, Bloomberg UK, EuroNews, France 24, Al Jazeera English, NDTV 24×7 and others do not appear on the list of channels in the BARB ratings list, so unfortunately, we have no idea just how many people watch those channels at all.

Onto the timeshift channels, and let’s list the Top 5 again.

E4 +1 – 0.6 / 13.6

Channel 4 +1 – 0.5 / 14.5

ITV2 +1 – 0.4 / 9.5

Living TV+1 – 0.4 / 8.0

UKTV Gold +1 – 0.3 / 9.1

Next, to the weekly Hall Of Shame…

Sky Travel Shop – 73,000

Anime Central – 88,000

Business Channel – 40,000

Community Channel – 108,000

Diva TV – 156,000

Fashion TV – 169,000

Golf Channel UK – 99,000

Legal TV – 121,000

LIfe One – 121,000

MusFlash – 60,000

MUTV – 74,000

Overseas Property TV – 41,000

Performance Channel – 195,000

Real Estate TV – 128,000

Rockworld TV – 41,000

Setanta Golf – 134,000

Simply TV – 40,000

The Baby Channel – 28,000

The Travel Channel – 191,000

The Travel Channel +1 – 180,000

Wedding TV – 161,000

Wedding TV +1 – 128,000

Xleague.TV – 96,000

And finally for this week’s ratings, a heads up for next week, when we get the first set of ratings for Dave, the rebranded UKTV G2. The final week’s ratings for G2 looked like this. 0.5 share / 11.9 weekly reach, which equates to over 5.6 million viewers. The timeshift version had a 0.1 / 2.6, which equated to just over 1.25 million viewers. Their last week’s top 10 programmes looked like this…

1 TOP GEAR (Thu 2001) 190
2 BILLY CONNOLLY’S WORLD TOUR OF (Sun 2220) 185
3 QI (Mon 2100) 177
4 TOP GEAR (Tue 2000) 169
5 DRAGONS’ DEN (Thu 2100) 150
6 BILLY CONNOLLY’S WORLD TOUR OF (Sun 2140) 148
7 BILLY CONNOLLY’S WORLD TOUR OF (Sun 2300) 143
8 BILLY CONNOLLY’S WORLD TOUR OF (Sat 2220) 137
9 THE CATHERINE TATE SHOW (Fri 2100) 131
10 TOP GEAR (Tue 1900) 116

So, just how much better or worse will Dave do? Answers next week…

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Ian Beaumont Contact More by me

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Liverpool, Thursday 28 March 2024