ABC beats Ten again in weekly ratings
The national broadcaster, the ABC, secured a 12.3% primary channel share throughout the ratings week, ahead of commercial free-to-air channel Ten, which had 9.5%.
The defeat for Ten comes ahead of the week it will launch its summer programming line-up including I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (tonight), Hughesy, We Have A Problem (Tuesday) and Show Me The Movie (8 February).
Ten’s entertainment line-up starts this week
During the sporting rights shake-up last year, when Nine nabbed the Tennis from Seven, and Seven and Foxtel secured the cricket, leaving Ten without the Big Bash League, Ten said its approach to summer programming would evolve, and it would no longer rest on its laurels during the non-ratings period.
“Obviously we were very disappointed with how the cricket played out at the time,” Ten’s chief content officer Beverley McGarvey said back in August. “We will invest that money [that Ten would have spent on cricket rights] into domestic entertainment.
“So what we have said publicly, and what we are doing, is we will program a full domestic entertainment schedule about 50 weeks a year… So we will effectively take a few weeks off at Christmas and go hard against sport the rest of the year – which benefits the audience. If you want to watch the cricket or the tennis, great, there’s a big audience for that – we’ll do something different.”
Formats such as I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, will become even more important for Ten, she said.
“What works for us is big entertainment, mass-appeal content – good stories about Australian people really well told. That works for us. And, you know, five years ago, probably you would have seen more international products on the main schedule than you do now.”
Without such shows this week, Ten struggled against the ABC’s primary channel (12.3%), Nine (17.5%) and Seven (19.0%).
The most-watched show of the week was Sunday’s Seven News, which attracted 910,000 metro viewers and 456,000 regional viewers, totalling 1.366m.
Nine’s most-watched program was Nine News, with 827,000 metro viewers and 1.093m across the country.
The ABC also found success with its news, with its most-watched episode having 627,000 metro viewers and 938,000 in total.
In sport, the Big Bash League match between Melbourne Stars and Perth Scorchers had 611,000 for session two (886,000 nationally).
The most-watched entertainment program of the week was a repeat of Death in Paradise on the ABC, which had 512,000 metro viewers and 273,000 in the regions (784,000 total).
7Two had the largest audience share of the multi-channels, with 4.0%, helping Seven Network to an overall win with 30.0%.
Nine Network was second on 27.3%, while ABC had 17.5%, Ten 16.1% and SBS 9.2%.
The graphs and charts below are provided by Nine and are built off OzTAM data. They exclude data for ABC and SBS.
