Audience viewing numbers: that was then, this is now.

Foxtel has never liked its ratings being compared with Free to Air figures.

For starters, it has a smaller footprint, in 2.5m homes rather than every home in the country. More significantly, Subscription TV works on a different model. Instead of one single broadcast of a show there are +2 channels, replays, iQs, and various ways of viewing via devices etc.

Last week at their Upfronts, CEO Richard Freudenstein gave an interesting example of how diverged their audiences now are, using Season premieres of Australia’s Next Top Model as an example.

“With such a variety of screens and viewing technologies it has become obsolete to talk about the viewers of a single program showing,” he said.

“To get an accurate picture of the success of a program we now need to look at total viewers of a program across multiple screenings and devices – including the initial broadcast, +2 channels, and encore screenings across the week, as well as time‐shifted iQ recordings, On Demand and catch‐up over products like Foxtel Go. Together these figures give us ‐ and our advertisers ‐ a clearer, more comprehensive picture of who is watching, and how.

“Using one of our top rating local productions as an example, from series 1 to series 8 of Australia’s Next Top Model we saw major changes in the way that audiences consumed this program – with the result being a bigger and more engaged audience overall. In 2005, series 1 of ANTM was broadcast on just one channel, with a few encore screenings across the week – delivering an audience of 217,000 viewers.

“Eight years later and the first episode of series 8 delivered over 600,000 viewers but, as you can see on this graphic, the bigger viewing audience is coming from many different sources, including Foxtel Go and iQ on demand.”