Seven's turn

Yep Seven's turn to win Sundays as the 6.30 and 7.30 slots continue their round robin between the networks.

Sunday Night got a timeslot win on the weekend that Nine confirmed the Sunday ACA as a permanent fixture. For all their trouble ACA didn't do to well on Sunday night (despite yet ANOTHER TV reunion - this time for The Sullivans). In principle it makes more sense to have A Current Affair on a Sunday than it does on a Friday! But shows like this are habitual so it's hard to break into existing prime time slot with a stripped show.

A rerun of NCIS at 9.30 for Ten didn't do much better than its spin off, reinforcing the notion that save for a handful of shows, (Big Bang Theory and Top Gear cheif among them) viewers are becoming weary of reruns. As I've read over on Media Spy some episodes of Modern Family (a sophomore show) have been rerun by ten 4 times already! Maybe ten should think about throwing in some Bondi Rescue reruns instead, save for cable I don't think that show has ever been rebroadcasted.

Laid over Lie

Wednesday, 9 March 2011

I thought Ten might have had some success with thier plan to sub in Modern Family reruns on a Wednesday night. Seems like I was wrong, viewers can indeed tell the difference between fresh and stale episodes.

The real casualty though is Lie To Me which was in the cushy 9.30 Tuesday slot but is now out on its own in the wilderness on Wednesdays. Why Ten didn't think it could anchor 8.30 is beyond me but leaving it with an incompatible and unpopular lead in is too much punishment. It was beaten by the largely unknown Laid FFS!

You might have noticed I've been experimenting with adding new digital channels ABC2 and now One, I'm not sure that it's worth it - ABC2 has a LOT of programs getting over the 100K mark but they are mostly daytime kids programs (by contrast Kid-Centric ABC3 is a non-event, partly because its catering to an audience - Tweens - that doesn't like what its selling.)

One HD - Ten's all sport all the time channel is now less sport and more manly stuff like Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch and action movies, its interesting that these diversions rate better for One than anything else on the channel!

Big Bang and the Big Hitters

Sunday, 27 February 2011

The 7.30 hour on Sunday nights is turning into one of the most competitive of the week, the week 60 minutes was the timeslot winner and Bondi Rescue posted its best audience of the year so far (for a well promoted episode I'll note).



Last Week Modern Family was the victor at 7.30 whereas the week before it was The Force. Every one of the shows at 7.30 is attracting a healthy audience. If only the same could be said about 8.30.

A few weeks ago you could point to Seven's Bones and see how they're dominating the timeslot - then ABC had to wheel out that old bitty Miss Marple, I'm guessing it's not the same Miss Marple I remember seeing as a kid (yes it's been going that long) but 1 million viewers is a very good audience for the ABC and proof that while every other demographic in TV is eroding the old folks are sticking to their free to air TV.

Maybe it's time to address television's cult of youth where every show is tailored to 25-54 or 18-49, then again, this same Audience targeting allows us to have multichannels these days.

On the multichannel front the main news was Ten bumped Smallville to a 10.30 slot replacing it with a movie which did way better and liften Ten's share. NZ Next Top Model is still struggling - but so does everything against Big Bang and the big hitters on the main channels at 7.30

Tolerance

Sunday, 20 February 2011

Lots going on last night with every network having a turn at a timeslot win (the Blue boxes) Particularly impressive was the performance of Miss Marple on the ABC as well as Modern Family on Ten (probably helped by a very funny promo this last week)



Digital went well for Nine and 7 with big numbers for The Big Bang Theory and Escape to the Country, but the best Eleven could muster was 115K for Everybody Loves Raymond, the rest of their night bombed.

How much longer are Ten going to tolerate Smallville pulling in less than 100K per outing? Even more disturbing - how long will they tolerate the lacklustre numbers from NCIS Los Angeles at 9.30 on the main channel.

3rd place is no Loser

Sunday, 30 January 2011

I think all three nets can be genuinely happy with their Sunday night this week. Well maybe not Seven, but the other two.



On the surface 1.3 million for Tennis looks great - but when you consider its the Men's Final - a match that has routinely pulled in 2 million viewers in years past you can see that Tennis has a slight problem.

Ten had an excellent Launch of their big new Sunday lineup with the constant promotion for The Biggest Loser and Hawaii Five-O paying off over the summer.

Modern Family meanwhile, confirms that Sitcoms are back in vogue with both eps pulling excellent numbers.

Apart from The Big Bang Theory on GO! there was nothing much happening on the netlets.