Summer success for European TV ratings

European broadcasters have seen a summer of great ratings successes, according to Thinkbox.

Despite an absence of a FIFA World Cup or an Olympics Games, viewers “remained gripped by TV shows”, with over 14 million Brits watching the Wimbledon Final, 13 million French viewers watching the Tour de France, and 26 million Germans watching the election debate between Chancellor Angela Merkel and Peer Steinbruck.

The report, produced in collaboration with TV organisations across Europe, recorded 14 million viewers for the final of Britain’s got Talent, and an average of 6.5 million TV-related tweets per month in France during July and August.

“Regardless of the device it was on, Europeans consumed a lot of television content and didn’t miss any of the national and/or European-wide happenings of the summer: political debates or royal “happenings”, tennis tournaments, etc,” said Philippe Delusinne, president of the ACT.

“Certain events gathered a whole nation, whilst others gathered large European audiences. This comes as proof that our industry is very healthy and while economic uncertainty affects advertising expenditures in some markets, the interest in reaching out to masses through powerful television content across screens and devices, is intact.”

The report also believes that the impact of YouTube on television audiences has been “overstated” by some commentators – for the first time, industry bodies around Europe have begun comparing time spent watching TV against that consuming various online media.

The figures show that the success of YouTube has not been at the expense of television; across Europe, for every minute spent on YouTube, the average person spends an hour watching linear television.

Tess Alps, executive chair at Thinkbox said: “[YouTube] is complementary to TV and it is going to grow, but the assumption that time spent on YouTube will inevitably cannibalise linear TV time is flawed and not borne out by analysis of real consumers.”