ratings

Among all broadcast and cable networks, PBS said it ranked fifth in the Nielsen audience measurement, compared with eighth for the previous season and 11th for 2011-12.

When a show is struggling, it’s always nice to have the most anticipated movie of 2015 to prop it up with. Marvel, which produces the Avengers franchise and ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., debuted new footage from next year’s sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron, on the second-year drama last night, and it goosed up ratings after last week’s series low. S.H.I.E.L.D. averaged a 1.7 adults 18-49 rating at 9 p.m., up a tenth from last week. Elsewhere it was a mixed night for broadcast against Game 6 of the World Series, which led Fox to No. 1 for the night.

The season premiere of CBS’s “2 Broke Girls” drew better ratings than last May’s finale. The show bowed to a 2.4 adults 18-49 rating last night at 8 p.m., overnights, up 20% from a 2.0 for last spring’s season ender. Of course, that was off 14% from a 2.8 for last year’s debut. Girls finished as the No. 3 show of the night on broadcast, behind NBC’s The Voice and The Blacklist.

ABC may be the biggest surprise this fall. While the network hovers in third place in adults 18-49 behind NBC and CBS, which have been fueled by football, when you take sports out of the equation, ABC is actually No. 1 this fall. The network has the top new drama, How to Get Away with Murder, and the top new comedy, Black-ish.

CBS, NBC and Fox all got a big lift from sports programming on Sunday night. Not surprisingly, the strong competition took a toll on the one network without sports in primetime last night, ABC. The network’s three dramas suffered week-to-week declines, and two dipped to all-time lows.NBC led the night with Sunday Night Football. CBS got a big boost early in the night from NFL overrun, which pushed its primetime schedule back to an 8 p.m. start in the Eastern and Central time zones. Fox’s World Series Game 5 coverage also got a big boost from an NFL lead-in and lifted the network to second for the night behind NBC in the demo.

The series premiere of NBC’s new comic book drama Constantine did pretty well for a Friday night. The show posted a 1.4 adults 18-49 rating, up 40% over what the network averaged in the 10 p.m. timeslot last season. Elsewhere on Friday night, Fox easily won the night with Game 3 of the World Series, which appeared to sap the audiences for rival shows on ABC and CBS.

A highly anticipated matchup between the San Diego Chargers and the Denver Broncos, two of the NFL’s top teams, boosted ratings for the final Thursday Night Football game on CBS and NFL Network. CBS was first for the night among households with an 8.9 average overnight rating and a 15 share. ABC was second at 6.5/11, NBC third at 2.8/5, Fox fourth at 2.5/4, Univision fifth at 1.5/3, CW sixth at 1.0/2, and Telemundo seventh at 0.8/1.

Against Game 2 of the World Series on Fox, the other networks held up pretty well. ABC was even to last week for the night, while two of CBS’s three programs were also flat to last week’s ratings. NBC’s crime dramas all dropped one tenth, though two of them were up in total viewers. ABC once again had the night’s top scripted shows, with Modern Family leading with a 3.3 adults 18-49 rating at 9 p.m.

The Media Rating Council is looking into the recent Nielsen glitch that inflated ratings to start the season. Here’s how it will go down. George Ivie, the executive director and CEO of the MRC, talks about how the investigation will be undertaken, what sort of consequences there might be and how this impacts public perception of Nielsen.

NBC’s Tuesday night comedy block declined by double-digit percentages in its second week. The new show Marry Me posted a 1.9 adults 18-49 rating at 9 p.m., off 17% from last week’s 2.3 debut. That was still easily the top comedy of the night on broadcast and keeps it behind ABC’s Black-ish as the No. 2 new sitcom this season. Marry held 61% of its lead-in from The Voice, the night’s No. 1 non-sports show with a 3.1.

Perhaps The Millers should have stayed put on Thursdays. Airing behind The Big Bang Theory on Monday for the first time, Millers debuted to much lower ratings than last year. The CBS comedy averaged a 2.2 adults 18-49 rating in the 8:30 p.m. timeslot, down a third from the 3.3 the show premiered to last year on a Thursday night, also airing behind “Bang.”

It was a big night for Peyton Manning, who broke the NFL career touchdown pass record Sunday night, leading the Denver Broncos to a 42-17 victory over the San Francisco 49ers. It was also a big night for NBC, which aired the game on Sunday Night Football and drew the show’s best rating since its season premiere. SNF averaged a 14.8 household rating from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m., peaking with a 17.0 from 9:30 to 10 p.m., when Manning threw his record-breaking pass. Elsewhere Sunday night, Fox’s The Simpsons was the night’s No. 1 scripted series with a 3.5 adults 18-49 rating.

CBS once again led the night with Thursday Night Football, while ABC again had the night’s top three entertainment shows with its lineup of Shonda Rhimes dramas. CBS led the night among viewers 18-49 with a 3.6 average overnight rating and an 11 share, flat to last Thursday. Meanwhile, ABC was second at 2.7/8, down slightly from last week’s 2.8/9. For the fourth straight Thursday ABC was up significantly from the same night a year ago, jumping by 22% among total viewers and 13% among 18-49s.

We’re now almost a month into the 2014-15 TV season, and between the changing landscape of how viewers watch TV and Nielsen’s blunders — a software glitch assigned more ratings to ABC shows than were deserved until the error was discovered last week — it’s more difficult than ever to assess winners and losers among the new broadcast network series. But by looking at all the factors networks consider today, it’s possible to offer this early assessment of some new series and their prospects for longer-term success:

What’s the biggest hit of the new television season? That simple question has remained the same each fall for six decades, but the answer has gotten wildly more complicated. These days it depends on whom you ask, when and how they watch TV and increasingly, where they hang out online.

After a delay from what Nielsen called a software error, ratings were released two days late. CBS won the week in primetime, averaging 10.3 million viewers. NBC had 8.1 million viewers and won among the coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic. ABC had 7.1 million viewers, Fox had 5.5 million, Univision had 2.8 million, the CW had 2 million and Ion Television and Telemundo tied with 1.1 million.

Modern Family led the night with a 3.3 adults 18-49 rating, finishing as Wednesday’s top show for the fourth straight week despite falling 0.2 from last week. Lead-out Black-ish posted a 2.5, off 11% from last week but still the night’s No. 2 show, just ahead of CBS’s Criminal Minds (2.4), which was up a tenth from last week.

Nielsen late Tuesday night updated clients on TV ratings that have been reprocessed following the discovery and disclosure of a “technical error” that caused a glitch in ratings for national broadcast networks and syndicated TV shows over a several-month period beginning March 2. Nielsen said that following conversations with various clients, it now plans to reprocess all of the ratings from that date forward, and provided a timetable for various reprocessing updates.

The new NBC matrimony comedy averaged a 2.3 adults 18-49 rating in its 9 p.m. debut, holding 70% of The Voice’s 3.3 lead-in. That marked the highest-rated Tuesday comedy on any Big Four network since March 4, which speaks to just how much they have struggled with sitcoms on Tuesdays. Marry finished as the night’s No. 2 show behind Voice.

After Nielsen released reworked ratings for the fall TV season that increased NBC ratings,  while lowering audience size for ABC, NBC wants to know why Nielsen isn’t looking into potential errors that seem to have been handing ABC big wins for months, a source close to the matter says.

Days after Nielsen revealed a software glitch that led to inaccurate ratings being reported for the past seven months, media people are understandably concerned about the service’s trustworthiness. They agree with the company that most of the ratings corrections will be negligible, not enough to significantly alter ratings for the start of the season. But they are very concerned that it took Nielsen seven months to uncover the error, and they worry about the accuracy of the data they are receiving going forward.

Rentrak continues to gain extra momentum with TV content providers. The TV-media measurement company has now expanded its deal with Fox Network Group, which consists of Fox Broadcasting, FX Networks and National Geographic Channels. The new deal will include linear TV ratings measurement and single-source consumer data reporting.

News ratings for the week beginning Sept. 29 were affected by a software error that created miscalculations of television viewership dating back to last March, so the previously announced victory of ABC’s World News Tonight last week over NBC’s Nightly News was incorrect.

NBC’s already-sizeable Monday night advantage got a little bigger last night. The network won its fourth straight Monday to open the season, posting a 3.5 adults 18-49 rating and 10 share, 35% ahead of No. 2 CBS at 2.6/7. That marked NBC’s largest margin of victory yet on the night. The network’s hit singing show The Voice was up 8% week to week, to a 3.9, while The Blacklist was up 8% too, to a 2.8 at 10 p.m. Elsewhere last night, the CW’s Jane the Virgin had a solid debut, posting 1.63 million total viewers, the network’s best for the 9 p.m. Monday timeslot since February 2012. It improved on lead-in The Originals by 22.

We are creeping closer to the day when more people time-shift a show’s premiere than watch it live during premiere week. The first batch of Nielsen live-plus-seven-day-DVR-playback numbers (L+7) came out Sunday, and they showed some very impressive growth by a lot of shows. Eighteen programs received at least a 60% bump in ratings from timeshifting. Twenty-eight got at least a 50% increase.

The CW’s new drama Flash, already the second-most-watched series debut in the network’s history in the Live+Same Day ratings, has leapfrogged over flagship The Vampire Diaries to rank as the most watched CW series premiere ever. The superhero drama did it with the help of a healthy 33% Live+3 boost, which lifted its premiere audience to 6.42 million.

NBC’s Sunday Night Football game wasn’t much of one. The Philadelphia Eagles destroyed the New York Giants, winning 27-0, the biggest margin of victory in a SNF game since 2009. But people still tuned in. NBC dominated the night with an 11.6 household rating from 8:30 p.m. to 11:15 p.m. That was well ahead of any other network, and a number of Big Four shows saw decreases against the big SNF audience.

Following a glitch that led to months of inaccurate Nielsen ratings results, the company on Saturday released updated data for the week of Sept. 22, which was the first week of 2014-15 TV season. As suspected, the inaccurate data favored ABC programs while hurting ABC’s competitors.

It was one of the most odd press conferences ever held. Nielsen, in the middle of announcing on Friday that it had flubbed the fall TV ratings because of a software glitch, took time out to attack a rival measurement firm. The rival, Rentrak, never lets “the facts get in the way of a good press release,” Nielsen’s global president Steve Hasker said, bashing the strides its rival had said it made.

Nielsen is reissuing total-day ratings from the beginning of the current TV season after it admitted today that it has misallocated some viewership results — possibly to the benefit of ABC, although it would not confirm that. As much as 98% of programs won’t be affected by more than .05 of a ratings point. It’s not clear whether it might result in make-goods. Those are mostly based on the so-called C3 numbers — the amount of live and delayed viewing over three days.

ABC’s revamped Thursday lineup continues to post strong ratings. The new drama How to Get Away with Murder drew a 3.1 adults 18-49 rating at 10 p.m., finishing as the top non-sports show. In fact, ABC had all three of the night’s top entertainment programs: Murder, Scandal (3.0) and Grey’s Anatomy (2.4). Murder was off 0.2 from last week, though the show’s rating has been rising a tenth or two with final numbers, as have the other ABC Thursday shows. ABC picked up Murder for a full season on Thursday. CBS, as usual, won the night with Thursday Night Football.

The new comedy grew over last week and finished as the No. 2 show on Wednesday night on broadcast, behind lead-in Modern Family. Black-ish averaged a 2.8 adults 18-49 rating, up 12% over last week’s overnight rating. Family averaged a 3.4, down a tenth from last week’s overnight rating. At 8:30, second-year sitcom The Goldbergs built on lead-in The Middle for the third time in three weeks, posting a 2.2, up from Middle’s 2.0. That lifted ABC to a win for the night over CBS, though it was tight.

The world’s largest media investment management group to use Rentrak for media planning and buying in the U.S. The announcement comes on the heels of news that parent WPP would acquire a 16.7% stake in Rentrak by buying $56 million in Rentrak stock and by accepting $98 million worth of Rentrak stock in exchange for the TV measurement unit of Kantar Media. It also follows news last week that another media agency, Zenith Media, would begin using Rentrak ratings

The deal has Rentrak paying $98 million in Rentrak common stock, which equates to approximately 1.53 million shares, or 12.4% of Rentrak’s total shares outstanding. As part of the agreement, Kantar owner WPP will also purchase shares directly from the company for $56 million in cash, giving WPP a final stake of 16.7% of Rentrak’s stock.

The networks have been hyping the big growth in live-plus-three-day-DVR-playback ratings (L+3) to start the season, and they have been impressive. Brian Hughes, SVP and audience analysis practice lead at MagnaGlobal, argues that it’s the live-plus-same-day-DVR viewing (L+SD) that media buyers should be more concerned about, rather than L+3. He talks about this season’s DVR usage, whether overnights are still valuable and what new show has impressed him the most.

ABC’s World News beat NBC’s Nightly News in viewership last week, only a month after David Muir took over as anchor from Diane Sawyer. NBC’s Brian Williams-led newscast had ruled for 263 consecutive weeks, a streak that began in September 2009, and for 310 of the past 311 weeks.