AUSTRALIA'S big night in front of the telly is getting smaller. Even when you exclude extraordinary events including the Commonwealth Games and the World Cup, by this time last year there were 28 events that more than 2 million viewers gathered to watch. The hefty audiences free-to-air television used to muster are being fragmented by an increasing number of entertainment choices primarily pay TV and the internet and analysts say it will become more pronounced.
But while pay TV grows and fractures audiences, it remains small. A documentary by former Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe premiered on pay TV last week after heavy promotion to an audience of fewer than 26,000 people less than the 40,000 who tuned in to Channel Ten's Thursday 6am news. Commercial director of the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association Ian Garland said free-to-air channels were losing audience share as people signed up to pay TV.
"ABC and SBS are relatively flat, but free-to-air (stations) are down and pay TV is up 13 per cent year on year," he said. Mr Garland said pay TV's presence in a quarter of homes was eroding the mass audiences commercial channels once held, which enabled advertisers to speak to millions at once. "It used to be really easy.
An advertiser would just buy a 9pm slot in the Sunday movie on Seven, Nine and Ten and reach probably 60 per cent of the viewing audience at once," he said. When people buy pay TV they cut down the amount of time they spend watching programs on free-to-air channels. Ratings show viewers spend 60 per cent of their viewing time on pay TV, stretched across the multiple channels.
In essence, pay TV claims to have a 21 per cent share of viewing, a figure that "beats" all the free-to-air channels except Seven. Networks count the five capital cities to define "national" ratings, whereas pay TV channels add both metropolitan and regional viewer figures.
News RSS