Digital Focus: Films, X Factor and football

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One of the eternal debates we have in the TV industry is whether viewers watch channels or programmes.

The conclusion, usually, is that they do a bit of both. Get them to buy into the channel brand and they will start to experiment with the programmes.

With all the technology and channel choice available today, it has become fashionable to predict that linear TV, with its outmoded idea of a programme schedule, will not exist in, say, 10 years' time.

Yet there is evidence to suggest that viewers still like to do some lazy default TV viewing. How else do you explain why Pretty Woman on ITV2 was the third most watched programme on multichannel this week, with 730,000 viewers, a 6% share?

The film is 18 years old, it must have been shown 20 times on television, everyone owns a DVD player, timeshift viewing is rife, yet this movie still delivers a mass audience. The great British viewing public are just annoying sometimes, aren't they? They refuse to behave as we expect them to.

Together with Saturday's Xtra Factor, which delivered 1.1 million (6% share) at 8.30pm and Sunday's The X Factor repeat  which had 760,000 (4% share) at 8pm, Pretty Woman ensured that ITV2 dominated the top three slots in the multichannel table this week. The channel's overall share was 1.83%, up from 1.73% last week.

Setanta Sport's first exclusive England football match, a friendly versus the Czech Republic on Wednesday, was a fair success. Having wrestled the coverage from Sky Sports, Setanta would have hoped for more than the average 500,000 (a 7% share) who watched the whole programme, but the match itself was watched by a far more respectable 749,000, a 9% share.

When one considers that this was a friendly game, always tedious affairs, and that the Olympics has caught the imagination of the sporting audience, three-quarters of a million viewers isn't bad.
Some 720,000 tuned in to Ford Super Sunday on Sky Sports 1, down from 1.3 million the previous week. But then it was West Ham v Manchester City. Join the dots. Viewers just won't watch any old football these days.