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Commonwealth Games: that sinking feeling

Without swimming on the Commonwealth Games schedule, TEN's audience has begun to sink.

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Without swimming on the Commonwealth Games schedule, TEN’s audience has begun to sink.

Primetime had a mix of events including football, athletics and diving, but no surprises for learning viewers aren’t as drawn to those like they are to swimming. Last week it was optimistically seeing a late surge to swimming events.

TEN’s average audience for the late session was 969,000 on TEN / ONE combined.

Sally Pearson’s Gold win at the Women’s 100m Hurdles was watched by a combined audience of 946,000 viewers on both channels, well down on the numbers that watched select swimming events: up to 1.32m.

Its Monday network share was only 20.1%, whooped by Seven’s 29.1% and even Nine’s 26.0%. ONE again topped the digital channel share with 5.3% ahead of GO!’s 3.4%.

For a Monday night, traditionally a healthy viewing drawcard, there weren’t a lot of star performers.

Only Seven News and Today Tonight passed 1.4m. Nine News was the only show to edge past 1.2m. Seven News had a big win over Nine News in the fickle Melbourne market. Today Tonight also won in every city over A Current Affair.

A coding error saw The Event incorrectly tabulated at a figure that averaged a daytime replay and its primetime showing. It actually pulled 946,000, under the 1m mark after 3 episodes.

Week 42

21 Responses

  1. @Jerome – the comment about the wait for 11 has been addressed here before. Ten wanted to wait for enough people to have HD-tuners before making One HD-only. In fact, No network launched a HD-only channel until just 2 months ago (ABC news 24, followed by 7mate and Gem more recently), showing that Ten’s wait is not hugely out of step with what the others are doing.

  3. TEN/ONE’s coverage was allways going to be ordinary at best. People want multiple events Live now and Network Ten can not provide that because of the antisiphoning list which prohibits them, yes their coverage can improve but think of it this way. If TEN go with the quality over quantity people will still be bitching about that and vice versa so their is simply no pleasing them. Foxtel will always have a edge over FTA networks this will only become more prevelant, with Foxtel getting more big time events. The only possible solution would be to simply scrap the Anti siphoning list and let the market decide.

  4. My husband has been watching alot of the games but he has been watching it with the mute button on because he can’t stand most of the commentary (on Ten/One).

  8. @Craig – how about Star Trek?

    I’ve said elsewhere that The Event isn’t quite cutting it for me. It’s better than FlashForward’s first half but not as good as it’s second half. It’s definitely not the new Lost or 24. I’m going to stick with it for a bit but the story will need to improve for me to stay till the end.

  9. @CK I like the event alerts as well. Though the ads are really annoying. I really don’t want to see Curtis Stone a ten dollar note ever again.

    I do get annoyed when they say an event is coming up at such and such time and don’t put the AEDST underneath. It’s just a pet peeve of mine being in Perth. Happend the other night on X-Factor when voiceover guy said it was live around Australia ……

    I think the over reason for the drop in ratings is the time difference between the Eastern States and Delhi. As Sally Pearson’s race was on 11pm there and Steve Hooker’s pole vault was after 1am.

  10. I am finding the 10 coverage of the games to be overly filled with advertisements which is the main reason for me switching over to other channels. Last night – ad break, come back for one 1500m race, ad break, see Steve Hooker do one jump, ad break. Very disappointing coverage.

  11. @ JB – I think the 10 coverage has been pretty good – comparable to 7 when they had the olympics. When you only have one channel it’s hard to please everyone and show everything in its entirety. Once they are allowed to use multi-channels the coverage will be better (like foxtel) because they can leave one channel playing the whole netball or hockey match etc and have the other channel staying with the swimming.
    I think they have done well to cover as much as possible, e.g. cutting from the swimming to the hockey or athletics on occasions when there was a break in swimming. I can’t remember ch7 ever doing that – they would just pretend nothing else was on during the swimming then play everything after it, as if live. (Will be interesting to see how ch9 do in 2012)
    I also like the event alerts – good idea – and probably keeps people watching until the event comes on.

  12. I’ve been fairly happy with the coverage so far and I’m not a major sport fan. But last night was appalling. Steve Hooker was about to go for his second jump and TEN lost the feed, went a commercial break and came back saying they still had problems and then went to the table tennis, back again to the studio and then to another commercial, back to the studio and we went to the relay, back to the studio and another commercial break, came back to the studio and was told they’ve got the Foxtel feed of Steve’s jump they showed that and then went to another break, back to the studio and to another relay another commercial break and then finally back to the pole vault. It was really a mish mash as if you were able to see it live the English pole vaulter came quite close to beating Steve Hooker. It was annoying as it was the finals …. surely TEN could of done something a lot sooner to fix whatever the problem was or have the Foxtel feed on standby.

  13. the event still did well i think. audiences are low all round, and it still won its timeslot. i’m loving it, the intresting turns just keep on coming. Its better then flashforward, as its easier to follow timeline wise.

  14. Well as long as NBC doesn’t pull The Event (which is unlikely) I don’t care what Seven do, about the only show with any scifi background to work long term on FTA was The X-Files, I’m struggling to think of another that lasted as long on FTA.

    Don’t think ONE HD will be going anywhere Ch11 will be SD but ITA it should be on now to give TEN viewers an option during the games. Right now that option is to go to the competition or 7&9 and their digital channels.

  16. I’m seeing a distinct similarity between Flash Forward last year (which I watched right to the end) and The Event (which I haven’t). Wonder how long until The Event is shoved off to it’s early Friday morning slot too?

  17. Well maybe if Ten actually showed sports besides swimming people would watch. Their coverage has been terrible. For swimming they would show the whole thing. Swimmers walking out, all introductions, the whole race, after race interviews. Now it’s all edited, cut, interupted, filled with ad breaks every 5 minutes. I haven’t seen one full netabll match, one full hockey match. It’s crap. They start to show something and then 5 minutes later say oh we’re going to a break, then they return to a different sport for 5 minutes before going to another ad break.

    Last night they were showing pole vault with Steve Hooker. They then went to women’s relay race, which after the race i could see Hooker and the British guy both with flags around them in the background so the contest had finished. Half hour later, they showed the rest of the pole vault like it was live.

  18. Who would watch it on Ten? The Foxtel coverage is better and you don’t get this dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/commonwealth-games/channel-10-fail-to-show-steve-hookers-gold-medal-win-live/comments-fn65mzk7-1225937424566

  19. I think tens main problem is that while other networks are broadcast on 3-4 channels ten is only broadcasting one low interest sport every night, GO! has had a huge bump up thanks to the games. ten realy should have got eleven up and running for this period so that their usual ten audience has somewhere to go within the network instead of just handing their viewers over to other networks.

    they have had years notice about the ability to make new channels and have been able to since January why the additional 12month wait? almost 80% of homes have digital now most of which are HD.

  20. I went to bed early for the first time since it started. It had a boxing match, and before that 2 games (one sided) of rugby. Uneventful is the word for last nights showings.

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