This week all the major broadcast networks held their upfront presentations, announcing their upcoming fall schedules and subsequently the new shows they would be presenting. I put together some handy-dandy color-coded charts to navigate the new landscape. It looks like ABC and NBC are going to presenting the most new material, while Fox has managed [...]

One of this year’s most promising shows, Fringe is widely considered to be returning next season due to its decent ratings. Some viewers have often said the show has benefited largely from its current lead-in, American Idol, which often surpasses 20 million viewers. In order to properly judge the ‘Idol Effect,’ I compiled all of [...]

A couple of articles last week about network television caught my eye. The first, in The Economist looked at how the ‘big four’ broadcast networks have lost ratings during the past ten years. The most dramatic decline has been for NBC; their ratings are been reduced by half. CBS and ABC have fared almost as [...]

Last week it was announced by much fanfare at Fox News and MSNBC that CNN had finished in third place behind the other news networks for the month of March. How is possible that the founder and brand leader for broadcast news had diminished so much in the market? I believe that this is a [...]

Last Thursday was the showdown between Comedy Central’s John Stewart and CNBC’s Jim Cramer. The interview of the latter by the former on The Dailly Show was the climax of an unexpected exchange between the two cable stars, begun when Stewart took aim at CNBC’s financial news coverage. I was looking forward to the show [...]

For the second time in two years, the Solutions Research Group did a survey asking consumers to choose their ‘must keep TV brands if they could keep only a limited number of channels to watch in their households.’ The top 10 results are as follows. ABC CBS NBC Fox ESPN Discovery Channel History Sci Fi [...]

During my last posting I took a look at the audience levels for the Academy Awards since 1974. Since I had the data handy I decided to compare the viewing trends to the Superbowl.

I recently saw this posting on TV By the Numbers regarding the historical ratings of the Oscars. Much has been made over how the event’s ratings are tied to how popular the nominated movies are so I decided to take a closer look. Since TV By the Numbers had the ratings information for all the [...]

I recently read an Ad Age article regarding the popularity of Univision’s content on YouTube. It focuses on how popular certain network content is on YouTube. A major point is how Univision’s telenovelas (Latin soap operas) are the most popular fare by far. Number of views of clips from the 10 most-pirated shows on each major [...]

This morning I looked at this MediaPost article concerning a recent study by Magna Global of C3 and “live-only” 18-49 ratings for the major TV broadcast networks. There are little if any differences between C3 and live ratings for the current television season. However, there is a noticable drop in C3 ratings from 2007 to [...]