Where did all the Newcastle viewers go?
18May09

The Newcastle Ratings Week 20, week ending 16 May 2009

 Only one program in Newcastle achieved an audience greater than 100,000 last week while the rest of the top 10 programs ranged between 84,000 and 63, 000 viewers. Those sort of numbers don’t normally represent Top 10 programs outside of summer non-ratings periods.

Two weeks ago the 10th highest rating program in Newcastle had 74,000 viewers. Likewise, this time last year saw an average of 10,000 more viewers watching the top 10 free-to-air programs. So where did all the viewers disappear to last week?

The audiences that did hang around enjoyed some of SC TENs new programs, helping them draw even with Prime for the week. In fact at this stage of the year Prime is in real danger of being passed by TEN and were in fact beaten in Prime Time by them last week. Meanwhile NBN is cruising along with a substantial overall lead in the ratings, eventhough they seem to have lost a large chunk of audience.

Most Watched Programs:

1 NBN Evening News Sunday NBN 118000

2 NBN Evening News Monday to Friday NBN 84000

3 Four Corners ABC 79000

4 Sneak Peek – Sea Patrol NBN 74000

5 NCIS TEN 73000

6 NBN Evening News Saturday NBN 68000

7 Masterchef Australia – Challenge TEN 65000

8 20 to 1 NBN 65000

9 A Current Affair NBN 64000

10 Sunday Football NBN 63000

The Stations Ratings:

         Week 20 2009 Week 20 2008   Prog 2009     Prog 2008
NBN               32.3                   33.3                33.5               32.5
PRIME            21.2                   23.8                21.4                 24.6
TEN                21.2                   20.4                20.3                19.3
ABC               17.7                    16.3                17.8                16.9
SBS               6.9                      6.3                  6.3                 6.6

Popularity: 1%


3 Responses to “Where did all the Newcastle viewers go?”

Can someone then ask Prime why their rate card has gone up?

Comment by Kez on May 18th, 2009

The vast majority of free-to-air is ‘meh’.. Even foxtel is sliding in my opinion.

We’re on the cusp of ditching foxtel and hooking up an Apple TV with the Boxee hack and just viewing programs online.

There’s so much content out there now that it is hard to justify paying over $100 a month.

Back to fta tv, seriously there’s nothing on these days that holds any interest for me, apart from the new Simpsons eps, the odd doco, and occasionally a bit of sport.

Comment by Mathew Packer on May 18th, 2009

TV is dead, Australia is 10 years behind the rest of the world, at least. Apple TV is dead. It is about open source access to everything. Torrenting, IPTV, bundled telephony, on demand programs (not fale Fox weekly DLs) and data. We need an NBN fibre network at 100MB (Thanks MR Conroy). Too bad we need to wait another 10 years. We need access as soon as the US etc. Choice, non linear access to media, no ads. In program, sponsored advertising. Every KM you get from a metro city is a step back in time. A rough equation would be 150km = 5 years. And our metro cities are still years behind Hong Kong or NY. We have great people, but weak infrasturcture.

Comment by jamie on June 3rd, 2009

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