Television audience share

[Philip Colmer]

Like a lot of people at the moment, I'm enjoying the new series of Doctor Who, currently being broadcast on BBC1 on Saturday evenings. The latest episode, Dalek, achieved an average viewership of 7.83 million viewers and a 42.73% viewer share.

However, what seems to have gone unnoticed (or at least, isn't getting any publicity) is that the BBC have started streaming BBC1 onto the Internet and there were quite a few global viewers watching the episode as it was broadcast.

So what does this mean for future audience figures and methods of recording audience figures? The old methods don't really seem to be valid any more, particularly if broadcasters like the BBC continue with their current streaming trials.

It is going to put a whole different slant on audience share when you've got 3 billion viewers :wink:.

--Philip

[Jason Dunn]

Interesting idea - I've often disliked the way ratings are tabulated. It seems so arbitrary that a certain number of families are considered representative and whatever they watch determines the fates of our favourite TV shows. People have complained about the privacy issues around the networks knowing what TV shows we watch, but if the data isn't aggregated (linked to our personal information) I fail to see how this is a violation of our privacy. I think TV could evolve to the next level if every time we changed the channel it was tracked and TV shows had real, hard numbers about viewership. I think it would change the landscape of TV...