How the big channels are defying the odds to prosper
Anyone who wants to understand something fundamental about the media just has to hold a single number in their head – 38,000.
It’s a decent size for most football crowds or those willing to watch a Wagner opera the whole way through.
But it doesn’t exactly pass muster as the ratings for a top US cop show available on satellite television and one that has been praised to the rafters by previewers and critics.
Going to the wire
You could argue that all the attention heaped on the first episode of the fifth series of The Wire may have put some people off. The story of crime and corruption in Baltimore may have appeared too dark and maybe even a bit too cerebral for some.
The fact that The Wire was beaten on its own FX channel by the more conventional NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) suggested an element of that.
But 38,000 is such an impossibly low number for what, by all accounts is a quality show.
Some larger and far more obvious truths must be at work here.
They are: that all channels are not equal in the digital age and that with very few exceptions niche channels are always doomed to get niche audiences. And while fragmentation across many channels will inevitably eat into the audiences of the five main channels it has happened to a surprisingly limited extent. The fragmentation has also resulted in niche channels cannibalising each other
The digital channels set up by the established broadcasters have tended to flourish in the multi-channel world partly because they have more custom built content but mainly because of the power of cross-promotion on the main channels.
The 38,000 who turned up for The Wire may be a perfectly respectable audience for some advertisers. There is a price for everything and it may make up a small but perfectly formed collection of cool, young, up-market adults who like more sophisticated American series. There will also be an afterlife for The Wire online and on DVD.
Irrational
But 38,000 should continue to bring an element of reality to discussions about the future of television.
It may be irrational of the audience but the same show broadcast on Channel 4 or BBC 2 could probably have attracted an audience of 1 million to 2 million.
By way of unfair comparison ITV is still entitled to point to peaks of 14.4 million for Britain’s Got Talent and 14.6 million for the Champions League final.
Despite the several hundred channels available via cable and satellite BBC Television, overall, still managed to retain an audience share of 35 per cent last year – marginally up on the previous year. In 2001 in his famous Banff speech the BBC director-general Mark Thompson predicted that the future of television would be thematic channels – rather like radio.
BBC One would be largely about entertainment and the serious stuff would be dumped on BBC Two or BBC Four.
He was wrong. The big channels with mixed content have survived and are even prospering in the new digital world.