Originally Posted by casinoman13:
“Would you say that BT would generally be pleased with those figures also considering the bigger Prem games have yet to appear on BT 1?”
The trouble with any such assessment is the risk of it being subjective as what is the benchmark? BTS is a new type of operation - available for "free" to 6m BT broadband homes + 1.8m VM XL homes + as a standalone sub.
The only real benchmark we can use is ESPN. We know ESPN had approx 1m paying subs and BTS had 1m specific sign-ups as at 10th August. But we don't know how many specific sign-ups BTS has now - they grew from 500k to 1m very rapidly so I would have thought they would be well, well above 1m now - possibly in the region of 1.5m but that can only be a very approx guess.
Given the above (and they are both in VM XL so that's consistent) , we would expect BTS to be rating somewhat higher than ESPN and it is. ESPN had reach of 1,340,000 and 1,533,000 for the two comparable weeks last year and an audience share of 2 mins in both weeks.
So I think the overall ratings are about where we would expect them to be. However in terms of how the project is going as a whole I think we really have to wait 3 or 4 months at least to see just how many of those 6m BT broadband homes sign-up (plus how many paying subs are achieved). And then, of course, what the impact is on BT's broadband numbers.
In terms of individual programmes I think the pluses and minuses are:
- PL rating well despite poor timeslot and initial weak games
- SPFL rating extremely well
- European football rating poorly
- Magazine programmes rating poorly - ie nothing of any significance at all for Balding, Baker and Kelly, Lovejoy Sports Panel.
The minuses aren't really a surprise and I don't think there's much BT can do about them - BT's content is what it is and there is almost nothing else of significance available for at last 2 years.
Though it should be noted that the Aviva rugby hasn't started yet so we still don't even have any initial figures for that. The Rugby Sevens figures were encouraging so maybe the Aviva rugby will do well - we'll have to see.