HDTV Ratings: May 31-June 3
June 5, 2012 
5 Comments
TV One’s HD premiere of Shackleton’s Captain foundered in the ratings on Sunday, with the two-hour broadcast averaging only 4.3% of the network’s target audience, 25-54 year-olds.
It opened with 6.1% at 9.30pm but closed with only 3.0%.
The docudrama rated fractionally higher with household shoppers, but followed the same trend, and averaged only 3.3%-3.4% of the other key demographics.
TV3’s Modern Family had a strong night, rivaling TV2’s The Big Bang Theory in every major demo except HHS. But out in front of both was the season finale of The Food Truck.
The 8pm episode of Big Bang was more popular than the 7pm, winning its slot ratings of 8.8%-11.7% while lead-in Mike & Molly averaged 8.1%-10.0%
After strong ratings the previous week, Ice Road Truckers and CSI slipped back on Saturday, the former averaging 4.1%-5.6% and the latter, 3.6%-4.3%.
The ITM Fishing Show averaged about half the viewership of HD rival Hyundai Country Calendar while the late-night HD indie movies, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Away We Go, both bombed, with neither reaching 1.0% of key demos.
On Friday, the HD comedy Hounds made a sound start, averaging 5.8%-6.4% in its 10pm slot, while The Graham Norton Show was neck-and-neck with TV2’s premiere of The Voice Australia.
TV2’s teaming of Big Bang and Two and a Half Men re-runs took the gloss off Glee, which averaged only 4.5%-5.1%.
Thursday’s HD premiere of Lethal Weapon 4 on TV One predictably rated badly: 3.6%-5.1%. (Why would you schedule an action movie this ancient on a channel whose target audience would long have lost interest in it?)
Once Upon a Time once again dominated the 8.30 hour, with ratings of 10.9%-15.1% compared to The Finder’s 6.1%-7.2%.
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June 7, 2012 at 11:41 am
Shackleton’s Captain. That looked good, would like to see it. I think there was a really good movie on Maori TV that night. Maybe they can run it on there and it might do better. Btw, why don’t you include Maori TV in these ratings? I know it’s not HD, but still some context is good. And if you have written an article about the ratings themselves, how they are currently derived, and the number of samples, I’d love to read it. Maybe other readers would, too.
Thanks for your thoughts. A ratings article is a possibility but not an analysis of SD channel ratings. The site is devoted to championing HD and I’m afraid I simply don’t have the time to analyse SD rating trends as well.
Thought you’d be interested in this!
http://www.throng.co.nz/2012/06/time-shifted-tv-ratings-3-june-2012/
People watched just in their own time and still on HD!
Leanne Pooley
Director
Shackleton’s Captain
That’s the first I have seen of these time shifted ratings. Forgive my ignorance, but could someone explain this to me? Does it mean that there is an official metric for the actual number of views from all the “on-demand” (post-broadcast) versions of programmes hosted and viewed on the internet?
If so, then that raises two key points for me:
1) Actual numbers! (i.e. not extrapolated)
2) Those with the desire, bandwidth and hardware to watch film and video content this way currently might just constitute a demographic category all by themselves. One which apparently values great locally produced content.
Thanks for pointing that out, Leanne.
The first lot of ratings counts the people who watched live as these people are the most important to the advertisers. The time=shifted ratings take into account the people who recorded the programme either on MySky or TiVo or the like (it doesn’t include on-demand this is a separate number again). The advertisers don’t like these as much as they know that people fast-forward past the ads. The fact is more and more people watch this way. If we are looking see if people actually watched a programme this is a better indication … on-demand isn’t included in this number, that comes later again.