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BBC News24

(August 2001)

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MA
Marcus Founding member
News24 has been promoting Newsnight all day as starting at 8.30. The EPG says 8.10 and the programme started at 8.02. Why can't they sort it out. If they are so inaccurate about when their own programmes start how can we trust their news reports. It must anoy the hell out of people who turn on at 8.30 expecting to see the whole of Newsnight.
CA
cat
Something that has always annoyed me is when they say programme start at .30 mins past.
Tune in at 30 mins past and you get the end of the weather, 2 trailers, 5 mins of news, 3 mins of sport and THEN the programme!
Silly really.
MA
Marcus Founding member
I agree, although if the programme is late you can always wait for it. If it's early you've missed it.
IT
itsrobert Founding member
So what happened to the news at 2000?
CA
cat
Well, it's not helping them in the viewing figures.
The most viewed programme last week was 'Gate 24', in comparison to 'Live at Five' on Sky News.
When you see the viewing figures over the past couple of weeks, the highest News 24 weeks ago was for a news programme produced by a totally different company - ABC. This week a travel programme is topping the ratings, seems a tad odd.
Plus, their viewing figures have fallen quite dramatically, they've actually halved over the past few weeks. Whereas Sky's have remained pretty level.
That's silly season for you!
MA
Marcus Founding member
itsrobert posted:
So what happened to the news at 2000?


We got two minutes worth.
MA
Marcus Founding member
cheshirec posted:
Well, it's not helping them in the viewing figures.
The most viewed programme last week was 'Gate 24', in comparison to 'Live at Five' on Sky News.
When you see the viewing figures over the past couple of weeks, the highest News 24 weeks ago was for a news programme produced by a totally different company - ABC. This week a travel programme is topping the ratings, seems a tad odd.
Plus, their viewing figures have fallen quite dramatically, they've actually halved over the past few weeks. Whereas Sky's have remained pretty level.
That's silly season for you!



And as I said before, BARB always issues a warning with the figures for all the news channels, in that the sample is so low they are very unreliable.
CA
cat
Yes but with digital they aren't that unreliable - not when you can work out exactly who is watching what.
They aren't very unreliable - they are pretty accurate - and viewing figures do jump when something important happens, so they give you a pretty good idea.
It's still accurate to say that Sky News gets more viewers though - regardless of the accuracy, they aren't THAT far wrong.
MA
Marcus Founding member
cheshirec posted:
Yes but with digital they aren't that unreliable - not when you can work out exactly who is watching what.
They aren't very unreliable - they are pretty accurate - and viewing figures do jump when something important happens, so they give you a pretty good idea.
It's still accurate to say that Sky News gets more viewers though - regardless of the accuracy, they aren't THAT far wrong.


It's BARB not me which says the figures can't be relied upon.

It's only with figures well above 100,000 that they become stastically viable, and news channles very rarely reach that.

And how on earth can anyone claim to know how many viewers are watching Digital TV. Unless you mean that Sky collects the info from the phone line connected to your box. This is something they've always claimed they would never do, unless you know better


(Edited by marcus at 9:49 pm on Aug. 25, 2001)
CA
cat
Sky reached 100,000 just last week.
I'm sure the digibox has the ability to collate viewing figure information, it's certainly been done amongst a select group of homes.
MA
Marcus Founding member
If so how do they tell when anyone is actually watching the thing. Most people I know just leave the box on all night. And anyway this excludes all viewers on DTT, which does not carry sky news.


Basicaly you can work out very basic trends from the figures, biut only by averaging them out over a long period. Being such a low sample the figures are very erratic, which explains why different programmes get vastly different viewing figures each week. Gate 24 may well be the highest one week, but could then be the lowest the next week, becauyse the family who watched it have gone to the cinema.
CA
cat
So that's why Sky News was beaten by News24 whilst I was on holiday! lol

The figures do include all multichannel homes, uncluding DTT. They also include cable figures, where News 24 has a far higher penetration than Sky News.
Which is why it is remarkable that Sky News gets more viewers on cable than News 24 and gets voted cable news channel of the year, every year.
The average top viewing figure is about 80,000. Gate 24 has 50,000 this week, but it was followed by BBC News.

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