Cock Blocked by Nine

OK so the title has very little to do with the post in this instance - but Nine's revival of the Block as a strip has gotten off to a great start.

Elsewhere - Seven's coverage of Wimbeldon on 7TWO has delivered less spectacularly, and more worryingly their 9.30 show on the main channel (Air Crash Investigations) is dead in the water. When you're beaten by Rescue Special Ops you know you have failed.

Monday May 9th, 2011

Good ratings for The Big Bang Theory in the face of the all conquering Masterchef. But Masterchef's highs still aren't rubbing off on the rest of Ten's sked.

Especially sad is GNW which didn't even air in the AFL states.

All I can personally say is thank FRAK that Seven has the AFL rights next year, they consistently have the most boring and stale lineup (from a 34yo male perspective anyway) and so I won't care one iota when AFL storms in on a Monday or Thursday night to disrupt the regular schedule.

Over on digital it was all 7TWO with GO! suffering a particularly bad night (only Top Gear appeared in the top 50) part of the blame there has to lay with their scheduling - to the casual observer GO! appears to have 4 shows: Top Gear, Big Bang, Two and a Half Men and Wipeout! and their scheduling has all the consistency and predictability of a game of roulette.

Nine outta just pick a night for each of these shows and use them to promote their less popular shows and stop peppering them all over the schedule.

One way to get viewers

Wednesday, 23 March 2011


Thursday, 24 March 2011


Is there even a point now to taking ratings Surveys, just tick the box marked 7 and move on. My Kitchen Rules is a steam roller for Seven, so much so that its worth asking whether anything they have in the winter that can match it.

7TWO's british dramas have a similar hegemony over the digital spectrum. Posting big total audience numbers with shows aimed at older viewers while the rest of digital scraps over the under 49s.

On Thusrday we had Ten broadcasting the first match of the AFL season. Almost 1/3 of the total audience watched the match in High Definition giving OneHD one of its biggest audiences so far this year.

Some Channels Do Ave Em

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

NCIS had an outstanding return last night giving Ten a leg up for the night. Viewers weren't as kind to the reruns though, Hawaii Five-O did okay for an encore but reruns of Top Gear and 20 to 01 on Nine really struggled.



On the digital front the Britcoms were once again unassailable. In a lot of ways 7TWO is eroding the ABC's audience. This is an audience that for decades knew if they wanted Britcoms they needed Auntie, sure Seven and Ten would have the occassional fling with the mother country but by and large the place to be was the ABC.

Now that 7TWO offers wall to wall British programming with pesky interruptions from docos or Australian Drama, fully one half of the ABC's post 8pm audience has up and deserted her for greener pastures.

Still being served

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Tuesday night mostly belonged to Seven which at 8pm commanded some 1.3 million viewers across it's 3 channels.



Even though individually after 7pm no show pulled over 800,000 viewers there was still about 4 million metro people overall watching in the 7.30 hour, it just that they're now split over 15 channels rather than 5 like in the old days!

The netlets too are starting to have breakout performers, for a long time on GO! The Big Bang Theory has been the star performer on the network, whereas Family Guy and American Dad! are routinely the best on ground for 7mate. Eleven also has early breakout hits with The Simpsons and Neighbours but 7TWO's best of British mantra is paying dividends in total viewers, look t the ratings for Are You Being Served? A britcom from the 70s (and 80's - man alive it ran long enough!) that even had a sucessful repeat run on Ten back in 1992/93 has been ressurected on 7TWO with stunning results - proving the audience for these old shows is still around

Deciding on a Level of Success

Monday, 24 January 2011

I remember a time when Sitcoms were an endangered species on Australian television, now they're everywhere - often in the same damn timeslot - look at the 7.30 hour - no less than 4 channels are competing for the same Audience: How I Met Your Mother, Glee, Two and a Half Men and Futurama. You'd have to think the audience for these shows is pretty interchangable, I wonder how many Monday's we'll see this before either Nine or Ten blinks. 789,000 for Two and a Half Men is pretty sad even in summer and demonstrates the diminishing returns of pumping this show to death and wider variety of alternatives on offer now.



One thing that stands out on examining the schedule is Seven's acumen in programming their second digital channel - 7TWO. 7TWO has been around for a while now but in the last year it has morphed into a repository of old skewing British fare. It gives them a clear point of difference from the more youth-appealing GO! and ensures there's always a crowd turning up to watch - look at the numbers, all three shows over 300,000 which I think I will nominate as the level for multichannel success.

At least you have Steve Leibmann

Wednesday was a curiously low-viewing night across all the channels with only the bafflingly popular Customs and the milquetoast Spick & Specks making any real impression on the people meters.

The popularity of Customs was perhaps helped along by yesterday’s news story about Australia’s international terminals installing those nude scanners by next year

Only a few nights into the season and already I can see a trend emerging and a problem for programmers to solve.

Young viewers are mostly gone, at least large numbers of them are using the DVR or the internet or watching cable and the digital channels (Lost’s final season premiere was top of the digital pops last night with 216,000 viewers).

The ones that are left are spread so thinly that even youth magnets like So You Think You Can Prance are finding it hard to keep a million people in front of the box for two hours.

In their place the nets are trying to pitch to older viewers, notice how almost the hot young-skewing properties on Seven and Nine have made their way to 7TWO and GO! while people stuck with analogue TV feast on a morbid diet of docu-soaps and cop shows.

Now we have the situation where two cop shows can’t exist in the same space – look at the 8.30 aud for Cold Case, a veteran show for Nine was smothered in fourth place, suffocated by the more agile Criminal Minds – itself headed for veteran status in it’s fifth season and struggling to maintain a healthy figure.

The low, low audience for sophomore doco Gangs of Oz might suggest that people are starting to tire of this real crime stuff – seriously anyone who is way into this has an entire cable channel along with numerous shows on other channels to sift through day after day – Gangs has to be pretty special to make its mark and the problem is – it has no real hook – Crime Investigation Australia the CI series which is rerun on Nine at least has Steve Leibmann.