The World Cup is almost into the second round but the real competition might be taking place behind the cameras, between the broadcasters. In the U.S., two companies have television broadcast rights: Disney (ABC and ESPN) has the English-language rights and Univision (Univision, Telefutura and Galavision) has the Spanish-language rights. It was expected that Unvision would [...]

Two weeks ago ABC broadcast the final episode of Lost, a popular show that whose ratings I’ve been posting about every now and then. The last episode tallied 13.5 million viewers, which was more viewers than the season’s premiere (something that hasn’t happened since the first season) and the most viewers for any episode within [...]

Although I really love my new job in online advertising sales, as I previously worked for 12 years in TV, I am still irked when I hear media pundits declare the inevitability of television’s demise. It was thus with some sense of reassurance and satisfaction that I recently read the positive report by The Economist of the [...]

I wanted to follow my last post on U.S. Spanish language TV ratings by focusing just on telenovelas, and how their similar storylines draw similar audience flows. This analysis is based on the same data as the previous post, a consolidation of household (HH) ratings data from archived newsletters, dating back to April 3, 2009. [...]

I love reading about television ratings but not much coverage is given to Hispanic channels, an unusual discrepancy considering that 16% of the U.S. population and 11% of TV households are Hispanic. The lack of coverage may be due to the fact that Hispanic programming is so diferente. During weekday primetime Univision and Telemundo program mostly telenovelas, which run around [...]

Last night CBS attracted an average of 106.5 million viewers during its transmission of Super Bowl XLIV, which effectively made it the most watched broadcast program of all time. While the Super Bowl has always been a major broadcast event in the United States its average audience has been growing steadily at around 2.3% since [...]

Last night the final season of Lost began with a double episode premiere, garnering an average of 12.1 million viewers. The good news is that this is about 6% more than last season’s premiere, and it’s also the first time since Season 2 that a premiere has a larger audience than its precursor. The better news is that the [...]

An article today in the Financial Times mentions how Apple is supposedly pressuring TV networks to cut their episode pricing on iTunes in half, from $1.99 to $1. The price cut indicates that television sales have been lackluster. While exact iTunes sales information isn’t offered, it is known that Apple had accumulated sales of 15 million TV episodes [...]

James Cameron’s latest film Avatar has had yet another strong weekend at the box office, making $50.3 million and breaking the record for biggest four weekend gross, previously held by Cameron’s penultimate film Titanic. Despite having not such a spectacular opening weekend, Avatar has maintained dropped off less than most movies and has already made [...]

I wanted to follow up yesterday’s note on cable carriage fees by imagining a model that would determine such fees, at least partly, on the relative amount of audience that a channel attracts. It occurred to me that such a model would be well suited for a digital subscription service, since it could faithfully measure [...]