ScreenWatch

David Graham writes: A chance to see how an SVOD audience compares. The Fall was shown in Britain before it went to Netflix and Amazon so BARB recognises its ID. Our content report can therefore pick up its viewing. Series 3, up to September 2, got an average of 1.8m views per episode, presumably shared between the two.  By way of comparison a single episode of Doc Martin on ITV the day before got just over 3m and will add more over the following week. That gives an idea what a successful SVOD show aims to achieve. The Fall has had a sustained run on Netflix, second or third in the UK order ever since August 3. Amazon does not give out any information. (Source BARB/Attentional).

David Graham writes: the user base will probably have been young, used to using mobile phones and tablets to watch on-demand TV. Overnights.tv is paying close attention to this kind of viewing and a new report, shortly to be available, will help our clients to track this group.

Unsolved Mysteries: Matched and Unmatched data

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What Were the Kids Up To? Quick look at kids viewing over Lockdown.

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David Graham writes: The Last Dance is a sports documentary focusing on the Chicago Bulls between 1997 and 1998. It follows Michael Jordan and his team as they begin a quest to win a sixth NBA title in eight years. It was compiled from over 500 hours of footage captured by a crew with an all-access pass to the Bulls during the NBA season.

The first two episodes of this 10-part series debuted on Netflix last month, on Monday 20 April. Two more episodes are being released every Monday until the series wraps up in the UK on 18 May.

The story of its Netflix release is interesting. Launched on April 20th it's 3rd in the Netflix rankings for the UK by the 23rd. 

When the next two episodes are released it jumps into 4th place immediately and stays in the top order of the top 10 for three days. 

The following two episodes do even better –– straight to No 1 in the UK rankings and still there as this is being written.

Two more episodes will come on the  May 11th, two more after that on the 18th.

For a completely different release strategy look at Too Hot to Handle from UK company Talkback.

Launched on the April 17th it went straight to No 2, and was at No 1 by the 23rd. It descended slowly down the list, disappearing from the Top 10 by May 4th. (We are promised a reunion on the May 8th.)

A pretty strong performance but with a very different curve! Obviously binged, and targeted at the 16-34 audience that has turned Love Island into such a strong franchise for ITV2.

I've only started tracking Netflix release patterns over the last six weeks. Some are traditional, if adapted to its unique role in the new entertainment landscape (although two-eps-at-a-time has been an occasional on traditional TV). Some may be novel. What else have they come up with? I’ll keep watching.

BTW:  basketball is now the second most popular sport played in the UK by 11- to 15-year-olds. 

NOTES: The Last Dance comes from ESPN Films and Netflix, and is produced by Michael Tollin. Too Hot to Handle comes from Talkback and was created by Laura Gibson and Charlie Bennet based on an episode of Seinfeld called “The Contest”. Love Island’s 6th series has sadly been cancelled because of the coronavirus epidemic. 

After much debate among Whovians about whether or not suspension of disbelief could run as far as allowing the titular Doctor, in Doctor Who, to regenerate as a female, it has happened anyway. Jodie Whittaker made her entrance in the titular lead role (not including a brief cliffhanger appearance), in the first episode of the new series under showrunner Chris Chibnall, in a new Sunday evening slot, at 6.45pm.  This placed it between regular big-hitters Countryfile, and the Strictly Come Dancing Results show.  This tactic paid off, as Doctor Who attracted an overnights audience of 8.2m (40%).

As well as attracting the highest series launch audience since 2009, the latest regeneration also attracted a high proportion of female viewers - 52.5%; the highest since 2007, when David Tennant was averaging high viewing figures and proving popular with females.

However, for children 4-15, while Sunday's 713,700 was more than twice the overnights audience of  the series 10 opener on 15th April 2017, they still comprised only 8.7% of the audience. In 2007, children made up nearly 20% of the audience and, excluding last year's series, have averaged 15.8% of the audience for the Saturday series premieres. Conversely, the proportion of viewers aged 65+ was 25.9%: this is the highest figure for any of the Doctor Who reboot series premieres.  Is this because this demographic are regularly viewing BBC1 in this Sunday slot.? Will they stick with it?

England's run through the 2018 World Cup has booked them a quarter final place on 7th July, for the first time since 2006.  Has the intervening 12 years made a difference to the viewing of live events on linear TV?

In 2006 in Germany, England qualified at the top of their group, (ahead of Saturday's rivals, Sweden).  This booked them a clash with Ecuador on Sunday 25th June 2006 in Stuttgart.  The overnights audience for the match on BBC1, which kicked off at 4pm, was 16.3m (80.2%). This was only slightly lower than the audience of 16.5m for Tuesday's knockout match between England and Colombia, but had a significantly higher share, meaning fewer people in total were watching television at the time than were watching this week's evening match, but then you would expect higher TV audiences in peaktime.

Happy New Year to all our clients - and occasional readers.

Looking just at the overnights figures, until all consolidated data is in next week, 2017 has certainly seem some resounding successes on TV.  BBC1 had another huge hit with Blue Planet II, which delivered superb audience figures. Strictly Come Dancing also achieved ts highest ever average audience figures for the main Saturday night shows.

However, the biggest winners may really have been some of the smaller channels - particularly on Freeview.  Looking at overall average audience 000s in overnights figures, Sony Movie Channel saw the biggest increase - up from 5,192 in 2016 to 40,640, after it effectively merged with Movie Mix and became available on Freeview. New channel Quest Red made a decent start with an average of 21,419 viewers and a 0.28% share. Even those channels not individually measured by BARB posted a small gain, with "Other Cable/Satellite" channels rising by 0.05 share points to 1.02%

Of the "Big 5" channels (the former terrestrial channels), ITV actually gained a small amount of share, although overall, audiences were down slightly: the 2017 average was 15.82%, compared with 2016's 15.69%, and audiences declined by 37,000. Channel 5 also gained a small amount of share: 4.14% for 2017, vs 4.03% the previous year, while the average audience dropped by 3420. Channel 4 saw a small share drop of 0.07 share points year-on-year, with an audience decline of 21,590. Fortunes were mixed for its sister channels: 4Seven did well, with a small share rise and an increase in audience of 3,930, while there were share increases but small drops in viewer numbers for Film4 and More 4.  However, E4 saw a more significant share fall of 0.13 share points, and a loss on average of 15,200 viewers.

While BBC1 retained its position as the most-watched channel of 2017, with an average share of 22.25%, it did see an overall drop of 0.26 share points and 87,000 viewers, on average.  BBC2 and BBC4 both saw smaller drops in share - 0.09 and 0.07 points respectively.

The long awaited/dreaded new series of The Great British Bake Off launched last week in its new Tuesday, 8pm slot on Channel 4.  Of course there was huge pressure on the show to achieve the kind of figures that it had won on BBC1, but that was unrealistic for Channel 4, where the 52 week overnights average for that Tuesday slot was 1.4m viewers. With the added controversy (among hardcore GBBO viewers) over the change of personnel, the show was never going to start with the same figures on which it ended on BBC1.

That being said, Channel 4 can certainly count the launch a huge success: the overnights audience of 6.5m was its highest since the Paralympics opening ceremony in 2012.  Many of the reviews were favourable, and were happy that the recipe that made the show such a success for the BBC has been retained, as far as possible, with the new personnel, and Noel Fielding may gain a new army of fans with his gentle approach and marigold-eating antics (the flower, not the rubber gloves!).

There is more good news for Channel 4 in that the audience profile for the show is considerably younger than that for its slot benchmark, with a much more even age split than it achieves on average.  Also, even before the final gold-standard consolidated programme data is in, the Bake Off has already added almost 2m to its audience total.  The number of viewers also grew over the course of the 75 minutes, so at no point did it turn people off in droves.

BBC1's recent venture into proper adult Saturday-night drama, Taboo, has come to an end. Was this experiment successful?

Since 2002, BBC1 has only aired 16 drama series in Saturday peaktime (1800-2300).  Most of these were aimed squarely at family viewing; Doctor Who, Merlin, Atlantis, Robin Hood and, more recently The Musketeers. Apart from these, the soap-inclined Casualty has been a mainstay of the Saturday schedule, accounting for by far the most Saturday peaktime drama hours - 531 over 15 years.  Doctor Who holds the second position with 91 hours, and Taboo ranks 9th with just 7.5 hours.

So which of these really attracted viewers to BBC1 on a Saturday night?  Top of the list is Jonathan Creek, which had Live viewing figures - actual bums on seats watching at time of broadcast - averaging 7.3m over 8 transmissions, with catch-up viewing only adding a further 817,000.  However, these were broadcast back in 2003-2004.  

In 2005, Sea of Souls, a paranormal drama, was tried in the Saturday-night post-watershed slot, where it averaged a respectable 5.2m in Live viewing, and just 380,000 in catch-up.

Since then, the landscape has changed considerably, with far greater channel choice and more options for time-shifting.  So while the most recent addition, Taboo, could only muster an average of 3m viewing Live, this was lifted by a further 2.8m in catch-up. This meant that the Tom Hardy drama was in 15th position for Live viewing in our list of series aired in Saturday peaktime on BBC1 since 2002, but it tops the list for additional timeshifted viewing.

The return of Sherlock to BBC1 on New Year's Day received a huge build-up, and the high profile helped to deliver a strong audience of 8.1m (32.8%) in the overnights.  However, the two subsequent episodes - which, granted, fell just outside the Christmas/New Year holiday period - saw the audiences fall to just below the 6m mark, the show's lowest audiences for episode premieres to date. But was this down to changes in viewing habits, rather than a portion of the audience falling out of love with the series?

When we look at the share the show received in consolidated data, it compares well with the first four episodes, which ranged between 27% and 33%, and averaged around 30%. This year's three episodes ranged from 37.8% to 32.9%, averaging 34.81%.  This means that the lower audience figures are down to fewer people in total watching television at the time of transmission.  And, while the audience watching on the day of transmission was 5.9m, a further 4.9m watched it in the seven days following that, taking its total audience to over 9m.  

Across the three episodes, the programme was seen by 19m people in the UK - almost one third of the viewing population.  And that doesn't take into account the number of people who will have watched on the iPlayer. While we don't yet have the iPlayer figures from the BBC for viewing in January, in December, they reported 281 million TV requests for programmes  from 16.7m unique browsers and, of these 16% were for live viewing. The number of people watching TV online is growing steadily.  There is little doubt that iPlayer viewing will add a boost to the Sherlock figures, when they come in.  It is a little early to suggest that Sherlock is losing ground: it is still one of the most popular dramas on BBC1: in the consolidated figures, the New Year's Day audience was the second-highest for a drama since the start of 2015, and the other two episodes were ahead of all but one episode of The Night Manager.