The King dethroned by NRL

Remember all that huffing and puffing about the audience figures for The King last week?

TV1 trumpeted its figures as the “second-highest non-sports audience” ever on Foxtel. So why has it wound up at the #11 show in last week’s Pay TV ratings with only 66,00?

Simple really…

First thing we need to remember is that subscription TV thrives on repeat screenings. The second point is to factor in TV1’s “timeshift” channel in which its entire programming is re-broadcast 2 hours after it first airs.

The 511,000 was the total peak audience of two screening audiences. Whilst peak audiences are valuable, it is actually averages that are the norm.

The average audience for the first 8:30 screening of The King, as I told you last week, was actually 176,900 -in Pay terms it’s still a fantastic figure.

The telemovie also had another screening (make that two with the timeshift channel) on Friday night. So it’s overall average weekly rating drops down with each subsequent screening. It’s one of the reasons Pay TV is so coy over audience figures, they are often misunderstood (plus they also show up crap audiences for some channels, but that’s another story).

So The King effectively had 4 screenings last week, giving a total average audience of 66,000. A long way behind the NRL which benefits from live, event-screening.

Make no mistake, the audience figure is still terrific for the telemovie. It just isn’t the 511,000 they tried to make out….

Download Pay Week 21 ratings at Ratings Archive.

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