The Channel 5 9pm movie, much trumpeted as a popular alternative to other channel’s offerings, can be seen as a general indicator of 5’s success since it launched at the end of March. This is not only because 5 itself placed so much faith in it as an audience puller, but because advertisers did too. It is also one of the few slots screened by 5 to regularly register an audience.
So far, looking randomly at two films per week since 5 launched, the 9pm movie has had a mixed run of fortune. Regular audiences of over one million, which in C5’s terms (though not in advertiser’s) is probably the equivalent of a 15 million audience for ITV, were consistently reached up until the third week of April. Mrs Doubtfire, undoubtedly the most high profile screening so far for the channel, had one of the highest if not the highest audience so far for C5, with almost 3 million viewers.
Since then however the 9pm movie audience has tailed off quite dramatically, falling to a nadir of 546,000 on 30 April, recovering slightly for Red Dawn and then falling again to 777,000. Overall since its launch the audience for this slot has been an average of around 1.33 million.
It is true that C5’s audience can only really increase as more areas become able to receive it and at the moment half of the UK population can watch the channel (C5’s estimate). If one were to use a crude assessment and assume that if every household in the country could receive the channel in the future the audience would more than double (probably even treble) as 5 becomes part of people’s viewing habits, then the flagship movie would still only be getting an audience of around 3-4 million (taking the average figure of 1.33 million as the benchmark).
While the channel obviously creates another useful stream for advertisers and may help to reduce media inflation, it appears that the quality of the programmes, especially the movies, must improve if 5 is going to progress into the media “big-time” that a widely available free-to-air terrestrial channel should. This then turns on the fact that without strong ad revenue there will be restrictions on how much 5 can invest in its programmes.
For a new channel branding itself as ‘mainstream and modern’ to have a flagship slot which attracts on average around 1.33 million people, the verdict so far can only be “must try harder.” Of course it is early days and many in the industry have rightly said that we must sit back to “wait and see” what C5 can produce before making judgement. The question is, when advertisers do eventually stop waiting and do make a judgement, if a primetime movie slot is pulling in 3-4 million viewers, will the channel be judged a success?
