It’s 18 months since Bravo graced New Zealand’s screens, delivering a dose of reality TV to local audiences in the form of Real Housewives, Vanderpump Rules and Million Dollar Listings. We speak to Chris Taylor, managing director of networks and distribution for Australia and New Zealand, about how the channel is settling into the local media landscape and what it has planned for 2018.
Despite the outrage surrounding the end of The Block NZ, it was the second strongest performing edition of the show across all six seasons.
Despite a worsening housing crisis, Kiwis don’t appear to be getting bored of DIY show The Block just yet, according to season five’s ratings.
Cantabrians Brooke and Mitch took out the latest edition of the Block NZ Villa Wars selling their renovated property for $1,350,000 netting them a windfall of $290,000 but the big winners for The Block NZ Villa Wars were MediaWorks, which returned very high rating numbers for the Sunday evening finale.
In New Zealand, as around the world, the amount of time spent watching linear TV is on the wane. So how have the five major free-to-air channels performed this year? And, with ondemand services continuing to grow (and with Fox following in the footsteps of cable networks HBO and FX and moving away from overnight ratings as industry currency in the US) is the current ratings system an accurate reflection of performance?
The All Blacks’ impressive 2015 Rugby World Cup final victory 34-17 over close rivals Australia played in the small hours of Sunday morning New Zealand time and drew over a million television viewers.
It’s been a rough year for MediaWorks, with TVNZ reigning in the ratings department. And despite its hopes that its pick up of Masterchef NZ’s sixth season would pull a decent few pairs of eyes over to the network, the show has rated significantly lower than its preceding seasons. But, as Auckland physiotherapist Tim Read was crowned as Masterchef NZ 2015 last night, the show’s final episode went out on a ratings high. PLUS: Seven weeks on, Story’s ratings are no match for Seven Sharp’s.
Despite all the hype, reality food show Masterchef NZ’s first episode of the season has failed to deliver in the ratings department, no doubt another blow to Mediaworks as it struggles to compete with TVNZ which is still dominating with the most-watched shows on television.
Today, MediaWorks announced via a story published on 3News that John Campbell would be leaving Campbell Live and that the show would be replaced by an alternative current affairs programme in the 7pm slot. The new show is expected to start within the next six to eight weeks and will run Monday to Thursday, with a yet-to-be-announced entertainment show running on Friday evenings.
he Cricket World Cup final on Sunday saw nearly half the nation sitting on the edge of their seats rooting for the Black Caps as Sky’s viewer ratings soared. The 11-hour match attracted a whopping 1,964,500 viewers across Sky Sport and Prime TV, with free-to-air channel Prime posting its highest ratings ever, according to Sky’s director of communications Kirsty Way.
On Wednesday night, Belinda MacDonald and Neena Truscott, dubbed the Modern Day Hippies, were crowned the first winners of My Kitchen Rules New Zealand. This moment concluded the battle for New Zealand’s latest food porn crown, while simultaneously bringing an end to a ratings battle that has waged since TVNZ first decided to schedule its programme against MediaWorks’ The Block NZ. StopPress takes a look at how the two formats fared against each other.
MediaWorks is playing the Paul Henry card next year and moving him to a hybrid TV/radio/digital breakfast show that will spell the end of The Paul Henry Show, Firstline and Marcus Lush on RadioLive. MediaWorks says his show was a success. So you can judge for yourself with a comparison to the last year of Nightline from Nielsen’s TAM ratings. PLUS: Firstline vs. Breakfast.
Many of those who drove to work at the right time on 14 July claim to have found the Kiwi roads free of the traffic jams that usually typify the morning commute. This fortunate state of the road was largely attributable due to the nation’s universities and schools being closed for the winter break, but the fact that 419,000 people (according to Nielsen TAM) tuned in to TV One to watch Germany take on Argentina in the final of the World Cup definitely also played a part.
Like previous years, TVNZ shows made up the vast majority of the top 20 most-watched programmes list for last year, with a magician, a talent show and two current affairs offerings luring the most eyeballs in 2013.
Fair Go is one of the great survivors in the world of TV and it kicks off its new season tonight at the new time of 8pm. But while the ratings remain solid, not everyone’s enamoured with the show, with Brian Edwards writing a scathing piece and offering some advice to those who come in for some unwanted attention.
There was a fair bit of chatter in the market last year after the Great Ratings Drop of 2013, something the broadcasters and their research partner Nielsen put down to a range of factors, including an improving economy, a mild winter and changing media consumption habits. Not surprisingly, the broadcasters remained confident that TV was an effective—and cost-effective—option for advertisers. But, in an age of supposed accountability and measurability, why don’t they release minute-by-minute ratings data to the market to prove it?
There’s been plenty of pomp, ceremony and brio in recent weeks at the new season launch announcements for MediaWorks and TVNZ. But behind-the-scenes, all is not quite so rosy, with a sharp drop in TV viewership since the middle of the year creating some concern.
Last night’s season premiere of The Almighty Johnsons started with a whiz and a bang, but the Johnson lads were unable to bring in the crowds to watch their godly antics.
The X Factor New Zealand, the latest of many popstar search programmes, debuted on New Zealand screens on Sunday to much publicity in the form of TVC campaigns, billboards and online advertising. The ratings coming out in the wake of the first two episodes haven’t blown any ratings records to shreds, but X Factor NZ is providing MediaWorks with a solid opening act.
TVNZ is currently taking a bit of flak over the direction—and the fairly significant decline in ratings—of its new primetime show Seven Sharp. But one of its faithful servants has continued to perform, with the first episode of the fourth season of MasterChef increasing its total audience by almost 100,000 viewers compared to last year.
The magazine industry is doing better than its counterparts in newspapers when it comes to retaining readers, with the majority of New Zealand publications showing stable or increasing readership according to Nielsen Consumer and Media Insights.
MediaWorks showed off its new season nuggets yesterday, and TVNZ is doing the same next week. So we thought it was high time we took a look at Nielsen’s TAM figures to see what shows tickled the fancies of New Zealanders from the key demographics in 2012.
In property mad New Zealand, The Block NZ was paying pretty low odds to be a ratings winner—and, due to all the opportunities for sponsor integration into the show—some of it comically gratuitous—a commercial winner as well. And while MediaWorks is remaining coy about the ad and partnership revenue the show has brought in, the first season did as expected and drew plenty of Kiwi eyeballs, with last night’s final, which saw siblings Ben and Libby Crawford walk away with a tidy $237,000 profit, gaining an average 5+ audience of 491,600, up from 389,000 in the first episode.
Prime didn’t quite manage to beat TV One’s 2008 ratings for the Olympic opening ceremony, but, not surprisingly, broadcasting the Games has certainly helped steal some eyeballs off the other channels, with Prime’s share and time spent watching numbers increasing substantially over the previous four weeks and all channels except for Prime and Sky losing share.
It’s a funny old world. While tens of thousands of New Zealanders got overly excited about KFC’s Double Down late last week (if you want a real heart stopper of a meal, check this one out), over half a million Kiwis also tuned in to see two amateur cooks creating the exact opposite of that for the final of MasterChef. We’ve already talked about how much of a commercial juggernaut the show is for TVNZ and its owners, both because of its heavy commercial slant during the show and the ad dollars able to be raked in during the breaks, and with improved ratings numbers on the first season, that looks set to continue
Television ratings, much like the make up of sausages, are a fairly mysterious realm for those outside the marcomms industry, and, after asking around a bit, it seems they’re also a fairly mysterious realm for many within it.
First there’s a press release from TV3: “November has seen Nightline pull away from its competitor TV ONE’s Tonight in all key demographics.”
Then there’s one from TVNZ: “The latest news numbers show Sunrise lost a quarter of its audience in November while NZI Business and Breakfast continued to edge ahead.”