"Is There Anybody There"

With the plethora of channels available today my question is Do any channels actually get no viewers at all?

I believe that once audience figures drop below a certain level, BARB stop recording them (or cannot record them). I'm sure someone will know where that threshold lies. No doubt many of the minority interest channels on Sky fall below it.

I think it's 50,000 for BARB, isn't it? Either that's when the figures get unreliable, or that's what one BARB household represents.



Presumably Sky have a plethora of ways of knowing exactly who's watching what. In the old days the boxes would complain if they couldn't dial out on your landline; now I assume they'll complain if they're not connected to your internet connection.

Though - I hope - they can't tell how many people are watching, which BARB tries to evaluate.

The on demand logs for iPlayer and what not are definitely sent, I read somewhere this happens on both Sky and Virgin and allows them to boast that three million requests for Doctor Who were made but the figures are delayed for whatever reason.

In theory it should be possible for Sky to find out which programmes were being watched at what times but whether it happens or not I don't know. I'd be very surprised if something isn't sent back though, and if the box isn't on the internet (rare these days) it'll just either build up and eventually get overwritten. The hard drive in current Sky boxes does far more than store stuff you've recorded.

I can't believe the amount of targeted advertsing we now get, particularly local companies

I remember reading a story in the early days of digital (of course it may be un-related) that a BBC Wales political discussion programme called "The Point" was effectively getting zero ratings and that it would be better sending viewers videotapes of the show.

Some wag thought the show should be renamed "What's The Point"

When ITV Sport Channel had the Football League rights (2001 - 2002) it was reported that the ratings for one particular game, comapred to the hugely over the top rights fee and production costs ITV Digital had paid, left an unfortunate result. It was calculated that it would have been cheaper to transport all the viewers to the game on first class trains, give them tickets to the game and put them up in a local five star hotel. (Presumably based on the majority being fans of the two clubs playing.)

In theory yes, although what use this will be in terms of viewing figures I'm not sure. Its one thing to know what programme is coming out of the box it's totally another to know who is watching it

When I had cable I remember that if I ever needed to phone the support team they'd always ask me to tune to Channel 5... and they could tell when I'd done it. Again no use for ratings, I regularly left the box on when I was out or asleep

It may be one of those data-gathering exercises where the box reports back to Sky on a regular basis how you got to certain sections, how long you spent looking at them, how big your planner is, how much you use things like catch-up and so on, presumably so they can turn around in three updates time and go "we identified that there was an issue using the <insert feature> option so we've fixed it and also nobody was using <feature x> so we got rid of it" and so on. Some sort of telemetry most probably.

Of course all that being said, Sky has a larger user base than the BARB panel so again in theory if it was used to feed the viewing figures it would probably be more accurate. After all its documented the BARB configuration works on a panel of IIRC about 5k houses? But I dare say in this day and age of GDPR one would have to opt into it lest the world know they were the only Sky household to see a 2009 repeat of Bargain Hunt.

It would only be more accurate if Sky had a way of finding out how many people were in the room at the time and what their demographic was.

That's what BARB provides