ITV Ratings Show General Year On Year Improvement
Last year, ITV’s proposal to move its News at Ten bulletin met with some stiff opposition from the public and government. The Network hoped that the move, and other scheduling adjustments, would help to increase its viewing share, generating schedule flexibility in the crucial prime peak segment and of course allowing feature films to continue past 10pm, uninterrupted by the news. Although a long and arduous process, ITV was victorious in its struggle and on the 8th March, after being given the go-ahead by the Independent Television Commission, the Network bid farewell to the traditional bulletin.
At first, public interest and curiosity generated a surge in viewing for ITV. Of those adults in TV homes, on average 17.6% of them were tuning in to ITV between the hours of 2000 and 2300 during March 1999 (whereas the figure for the previous month was 15.4%).
Year on year, ITV continues to show marked improvement, and for May 1999 drew 14.6% of all adults (between 2000-2300), as compared with 13.4% during May 1998.
The average seems very positive, but if one extends the time period slightly to all of “peaktime” (1830-2330), there are marked differences by day. Taking the 13 weeks since the changes of March 8th, ITV has seen hefty increases midweek – average TV ratings grew year on year for this period on Tuesdays (+6.3%), Wednesdays (+13.6%) and Thursdays (+1.9) – but this is not the case on Mondays or Fridays (-3.5% and -2.5% respectively). BBC1 has lost ground on Wednesdays and Thursdays, but has seen growth of its own across the rest of the week. Channel 4 booms on Mondays but has lost ground elsewhere, and BBC2 has suffered generally – although Wimbledon will mark a seasonal and radical change this month.
ITV can also point to gains across key audiences. Impacts for the crucial ABC1 audience grew by 3.7% across the ITV network (7.1% in London), and 16-34 year old adults show a hefty 13.2% increase during the period since the removal of the news.
The current run of Bond films is clearly intended to sustain and build on these successes. Speaking about the new ITV schedule yesterday, director of programmes David Liddiment commented: “We’re practising risk and ambition right now in the schedule. We’re trying new things at new times. It would be a fluke if everything worked. But increased audiences in late peak show that we were right to make the change.”