Posts
NME TV: The second least-popular channel in the country
There's a lovely table on Broken TV tabulating the popularity of UK TV channels. Based on the average figures for the ten most popular programmes broadcast in May 2011, most of the ratings for music channels are quite grim - only 4Music scrapes into the Top 50, with ratings of 98,425 viewers.
The once mighty MTV is at 52, behind NickJr 2.
At one point, The Box was going to change how we related to television and could at least call on drunk people watching overnight to shore it up; now, it's just the 110th most popular channel in the UK, with a figure a bit over 22,000. MTV Base is only 500 viewers ahead of BBC Parliament. But the further you fall down the list, the more once-famous music brands gather. Smash Hits? 15,000 viewers. Magic? 11,000. Q? 5,350.
But at the bottom of the bottom, with only WTF TV keeping it from getting mud on its ass, is NME TV. 4,950 viewers. And remember, that's the average of the ten best performances during May, implying there must be great acres of time when nobody at all is tuning in.
Adding salt to the wound, the great rival Kerrang is at least managing an average in the five figures. Just.
3 comments:
One thing that may contribute to it is that WTF TV and NME TV are the final and penultimate music channels when cycling through the list, before you go too far and start on the Sports channels. If memory serves there's a good 20-25 channels in between those two and MTV Music (which is the first music channel in the Sky EPG).
Of course, it doesn't bode well that when people do eventually find the channel, they don't tend to return.
I'd be interested in knowing what the ratings were like on some of these music channels back when they were actually watchable. I mean back in about 1998/1999 MTV 2 was great. More variety in music, more interactivity with their audience (remember the choosing a half hour block of music!) and no ads! Nowadays, in its MTV Rocks guise, it's not much different than the NME channel - i.e. it's trash. Presumably the changed the format to attract more viewers but surely it was never this bad back then?
That reminds me that I kept meaning to link to the Ofcom bulletin here: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/obb181/obb181.pdf (pdf, sorry) where WTF rebuff complaints about a Rihanna video by claiming audience data suggests no children were watching. Ofcom note drily that the "audience share for WTF in the month of March 2011 was zero".
It's also a bit disturbing how they try to defend the content of the video, but that's another story.
Post a Comment
As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.