So Prison Break season three has been advertised and promoted absolutely everywhere. How does Sky have so much money? They must have spent millions. And what will the ratings be? one million? two million? cos isn't that all that Sky gets? How on earth do they do it.
(good first ep though - i've seen it already! and read teh first 6 scripts! i can't say anything but...jesus christ...)
Update: So the ratings are in - half a million for the first episode. But wait - that is good news apparently, a record breaker! Erm. Wasn't it doing two or three million on Channel Five? Fox shouldn't have bothered selling it...
9 comments:
Yes, I think it just shows that the US owners care more for money than ratings. Lost did a similar drop from a few million to about 500k, as I recall. I'd be interested in seeing how the ratings for Heroes compare between SciFi and BBC2 too.
i was honestly joking when i thought the ratings would be low! i always knew they did maybe one or two million for popular shows - but that was a rough estimate. half a million - after all that advertising - is a joke!
Fox sell it to the highest bidder, they don't care about the ratings once it's sold.
Oh, and Fox and Sky are in effect the same company... so the only reason Five got it in the first place is probably that someone at Fox thought it would bomb. That, or they gave it to Five for a couple of series just so they could pull the Lost / 24 trick once it had established an audience of non-Sky viewers.
Heroes will be next.
nooo Heroes is safe, the Beeb have first option on that for a while.
Ugly Betty will be next.
kinda freaks me out how much money Sky must have wasted on advertising PB. they'd have got half a million viewers if they'd have advertised it or not.
And poor old C5 and C4 - they spent so much advertising Lost and PB and now Sky reap the benefits - well sort of.
Well actually i'm not that freaked out - i just find it interesting lol
Yeah, BBC2 have first dibs on Heroes S2, at least.
And C4 had first dibs on Lost Season 2...
Season 3 was out there to the highest bidder.
how on earth is it all gonna work anyway. we're showing PB just after the Yanks do, and ugly betty's coming on just afterwards as well - don't the UK channels realise that the Americans have loads of breaks between episodes? Not sure if they've thought this all through...
I think, and I could be wrong, that Sky aren't advertising Prison Break so much as they're advertising Sky.
Bear with me on this.
Sky commit themselves to a number of billboards over the year. For the sake of argument say it's 100 in a city.
On these boards they push their latest big thing. One week it's Football, the next it's Lost, then it's some other program or sort of program.
Each of these could be considered a minority audience. 500K here, a million there, 200K there. In themselves they count for nothing.
But here's the magic. When you add these up over the year, even allowing for overlaps, you get a pretty large number and all of them are signed up to a minimum contract with Sky.
It's pretty clever really. They know the age of the blockbuster 20 million viewer program is over and they're just looking at the niche stuff. Get yourself enough niches and you win.
i guess. half a million viewers still really sucks though. Will Sky ever really get any decent viewing figures?
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