Coding your show separately gets you a better headline
For the second time this week, Nine has cleverly coded a one hour programme into two titles. All's fair in love and ratings?
- Published by David Knox
- on October 27, 2011
- Filed under News
Is coding of television programmes getting a little bit out of control?
For the second time this week, Nine has coded a one hour programme into two titles.
The Celebrity Apprentice: Challenge Two rated 1.27m viewers while The Celebrity Apprentice: Wednesday was 911,000. To viewers of course, it was just a single show. The end result was a number higher than what the show would have averaged had it been coded with OzTAM as a single show.
That clever move also gave Nine the top ranking of the night.
While it’s not uncommon practice for event finales such as MasterChef or Australia’s Got Talent, or even to distinguish different nights of the week (My Kitchen Rules: Monday, The Block: Sunday) it’s never been commonplace to begin coding separate chunks of a regular, nightly show.
But when you’re launching a new show you want all the good press you can get and you want headlines that boast how you topped the night. Maybe Seven can start dividing up The X Factor into six parts? They’ll surely win the the night then….
And so to other results:
Nine’s new Young Doctors (all 30 minutes of it) launched to 908,000 viewers, but CSI dropped to 654,000. Replays of Unforgettable were 380,000 and 297,000.
Seven’s best was Seven News (1.22m). Home and Away averaged 1.04m, followed by The One (815,000), and Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior (610,000). Above Suspicion started poorly on 394,000.
The ABC again beat TEN with Gruen Planet (1.16m), Spicks and Specks (1.03m), ABC News (887,000), The Hamster Wheel (886,000), 7:30 (644,000) and the At The Movies special (641,000). Poh’s Kitchen was 602,000.
TEN’s best was a Modern Family repeat (702,000) then The 7PM Project (652,000), Bondi Vet (649,000), Hawaii Five-0 (567,000), and an NCIS repeat (467,000).
One Born Every Minute was SBS ONE’s strongest performer on 284,000.
Neighbours was the top multichannel show with 315,000. A new Simpsons episode had to settle for 239,000.
Seven Network won the night with 27.6% over Nine’s 26.0%, ABC’s 21.5%, TEN’s 19.8% and SBS 5.1%.
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- Tagged with 7:30, ABC News, Above Suspicion, At the Movies, Australia's Got Talen, Australia's Got Talent, Bondi Vet, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, CSI, Gruen Planet, Hawaii Five-0, Home and Away, MasterChef Australia, Modern Family, My Kitchen Rules, NCIS, Neighbours, One Born Every Minute, Poh's Kitchen, Seven News, Spicks and Specks, The 7pm Project, The Block, The Celebrity Apprentice Australia, The Hamster Wheel, The One, The Simpsons, The X Factor, Unforgettable, Young Doctors
27 Responses
They could code the elimination episodes like this, The Celebrity Apprentice: Elimination Padding (First 25 mins) then code the last 5 mins as The Celebrity Apprentice: Elimination Announced.
I am thoroughly enjoying Celebrity Apprentice, but I do not agree with the way Nine are coding it, absolutely ridiculous and should not be allowed.
Hampster Wheel last night had me lmao, it was so good. At The Movies was also a great show last night, Cate and Geoffrey co-hosting was a really nice touch.
I watched last nights episode of the apprentice and I was laughing so hard when the mens team were talking tactics and getting in the big dollars and MAx pulls out his phone and rings Kamahl to see if he was able to help. It was just funny because of all people Max would know he chhoses Kamahl. Im not sure he would had been keen on the KFC.
Good move by Shane Crawford to put him out the back though. It looks tense tonight with the ladies.
Nine could continue the trend with Underbelly
Code the sex scenes, the fight scenes and the pommy girl arguing with her husband scenes all separately…
This is completely stupid. Coding 1 program in 2 parts is utterly ridiculous. Nine need to be stopped. Its bullsh!t. I mean lets start breaking down ratings to show News, Sport and Weather for all news bulletins and then code a part for each part of a show. This is just bullsh!t. Nine need to grow up and OzTAM as much as i hate them right now for the restrictions and so on need to grow some balls and tell the networks how it is. The only reason Nine gets away with it though is because it owns 1/3 of OzTAM. Sorry but i am over ratings and everything at the moment. Its so disappointing.
@Jarrod: No. In the overall ratings for the night it will result in the same outcome, as they are a percentage of total viewers across primetime for all networks. The difference is it gives Nine the chance to show it has the top ‘program’ for the evening.
If it’s going to be allowed, then they should be required to show credits for at least 10 seconds at the end of the first ‘show’, followed by 2 minutes of advertising. (The intention being that the risk of losing viewers thinking it’s all over will be greater than the benefit of double dipping into the ratings trough)
No Jarrod,
The Program slot is averaged by the minute.
Viewers each minute divided by total Program time.
Splitting reduces Program minutes only.
So if a show is coded as two halves each with 1 million viewers, that’s 2 million viewiers for 1 hour, but if it is just the one show then it is just 1 million viewers for the hour?
It annoys me that they don’t reflect this in their EPGs. Why don’t they?
It seems they want viewers to know one thing, and OzTAM to know another.
Got sick of waiting for CSI so watched a recorded show – looks like a few others did too.
Ridiculous. This will get out of hand unless there is a clear rule in place. A show only ends when the closing credits roll. Same rule for everyone for every show. Needs to be simple, not left to the whim of a network to decide when to break what is obviously one broadcast show/episode/event into multi parts.
If Nine coded The Celebrity Apprentice into two parts, why did it not do the same to The Block earlier this year, when it was running one hour episodes 2-3 nights a week? It would have been easier to compare the figures of part 2 of The Block against other programs such as MasterChef.
It should be allowed for one broadcast a season – namely the finale – as a huge number people do actually tune in just for the announcement…
Nice to see so many people tune into the At The Movies Special. Almost double the usual ratings
nine are a joke… imagine if seven did it with all their top shows?
It’s essentially cheating the system and it should not be allowed. It was clearly one show programmed from 7pm and the ratings figure should reflect that. Its really not fair to other shows. More dirty tactics from Nine, at least you should have the decency to wear whatever rating your shows fairly get from the public.
Better numbers for the Chaser boys this week – loving “The Hamster Wheel”.
What I find amazing is that 360,000 people would apparently only watch half of Celebrity Apprentice. Similar thing happened on Monday…
Now this is just ridiculous and OzTAM shouldn’t allow it, but it’s owned by the networks isn’t it? We need an independent ratings system. So what the News would be able to separate into 7News, 7News sport, 7News weather, and then they’d have the top 3 shows? What a stupid situation that would be.
How embarrassing for Ten.
Twice this week it has come fourth behind the ABC and the sad thing is that I don’t think they really care.
Excellent editorial in today’s Green Guide sums up Ten very well – back to bargain basement television to satisfy the bean counters.
Let the CH 9 bashing begin… Zzzzzzzzzz !!
Nine closing the gap between it and Seven, but not making very much of a difference. Seven is still on fire.
I guess the only downside to coding like that is if the 2nd half see a massive drop off in viewers, doesn’t go well on a headline.
David! Don’t give them ideas.
Soon we’ll be seeing Today Tonight broken up into separate ratings for each story, or Nine’s wash-and-repeat-shows ratings separated by each ad break.
Or something!
If that happens, it’s so totally your fault. 😉
😛