Digital Focus: Sky 1 and BBC3
- Published: 04 September 2008 07:41
- Author: Philip Reevell
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- Last Updated: 04 September 2008 07:41
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Gladiators: the Legends Return on Sunday at 8pm delivered a big result for the newly rebranded Sky One with 960,000/5% share in digital homes.
The clash of the old and new Gladiators' teams proved more attractive than the previous week's Gladiators' final, which had 590,000/3.6% share. The channel started its Sunday evening with a new music entertainment show, Hairspray: the School Musical, at 7pm, with reasonable, but not fantastic, numbers - 480,000/2.8% share.
As this year has progressed I've come to think that it's a shame Sky One is not a terrestrial network because it would be fun to see whether some of its programming would give the other terrestrials a run for their money. One way to compare them is to consider viewing by Sky individuals in digital satellite homes. Using that measure Sky One's Sunday night primetime share of 7.5% would put it ahead of Channel 4's 6.9% and Five's 2.4%.
Using the broader multichannel measure, which includes Freeview, Sky One's strong Sunday night performance doesn't register so clearly. In our weekly digital channels table, Sky One lags behind ITV2 and E4. ITV2 benefited from Saturday's Xtra Factor with 1.3 million/7.5% share at 8.10pm, while E4 is enjoying the closing days of Big Brother's Big Mouth. Wednesday's show at 11.35pm had 550,000/8% share, the second best figures of the current run. Sky One also lags behind Dave, which is being boosted by quizzes and comedies like QI on Sunday at 10pm with 460,000/2.6% share and Mock the Week with 420,000/2% share on Monday at 9.10pm.
Sky One is also lower in our table than BBC3. Now I hesitate to raise this, given recent correspondence, but wasn't it a bit odd that BBC3 should carry the Arsenal vs FC Twente Champions League qualifier on Wednesday at 8pm? Admittedly BBC3 has previously carried African Nations football, but this one-sided, one-off second-leg qualifier in a competition where the BBC has no further involvement seems random. Still the match was watched by 440,000/2% share and the good news is that among the target audience of 16 to 34 year olds, it had 2.5% share. In terms of actual viewers it delivered just 105,000.
