But that means that all those "Freeview" viewers should really be counted as Sky viewers, as they also have access to Sky.



Indeed.

Which is why the only thing that really matters (if it matters at all) is how many people actually watched.

And those people with Freeview AND Sky usually have a need. Such as children, or the husband/wife want to watch something different. It would still add up to additional audiences. Besides, is the number of freeview/sky houses really that significant? £10 a month for the extra box means that most Sky viewers are only Sky viewers rather than Freeview/Sky viewers.

Suffice to say, Torchwood is scoring about 100,000 more viewers than Lost (if that) but Torchwood is available to many millions more people. Any politician can twist those numbers to prove that "one beat the other" but ultimately if Sky and BBC are happy with those numbers then all is well in TV-Land. I only mentioned this because I noticed a lot of "Torchwood beats Lost" stuff going on and it felt a little like comparing apples and oranges.

I don't care about adding up the ratings from different sister channels.

As far as I'm concerned Torchwood gets around 2-2.5 million on BBC2.

If we took the Saturday night ratings for Doctor Who as they were and didn't add on the repeat showing on BB3 then why would we do that for Torchwood?
If it gets 2.2 million on Wednesday night...then that's what it got.

You don't even get 'The X Factor' viewers trying to add on the Sunday repeat ratings onto the Saturday night ratings to boost them up. They accept the ratings for the main show.

The only reason I see the need to add on figures that can be picked up from scraps found in other places is if the BBC want to boost the figures to promote it's image.

If I want to know how well Doctor Who did when up against an ITV show transmitted at the same time on a Saturday night, then I'm not interested in what the ratings were when added to a repeat showing on another channel on another day.

I don't mind timeshift figures added on,.....but if you repeated a show every day for a week on another channel, say BBC3, then you would probably be able to pick up a few hundred thousand every day and boost the figures up to some artificial figure.

If Torchwood got 2.2 million on a Wednesday night on BBC2...then that's what that channel got at that time.
If Torchwood got 1 million on a Sunday night on BBC3....then that's what that channel got at that time.

There is a difference between showing something on one of the analogue channels first though. If TW had been shown first on BBC2, do you think it would still have got ~2m and the BBC3 showing would still have got ~1m? It's surely more likely to have been about 3m on BBC2 and <0.5m on BBC3. And then, as with DW, we wouldn't be adding them together...

K

How can we know what the difference is?

If the BBC3 showing gets about a million, then for all we know a good few hundred thousand may watch it repeated again on the BBC2 showing.

True enough, there's another 400-500K that watch the BBC3 repeat as well so there must be some overlap. As a guide, though, DW's BBC3 repeats were getting about 10% of the main showing.

Anyway, I guess we'll never know unless they deliberately do the finale on BBC2 first (like with Spooks).

K

'Out of Time' ( BBC3) - 900,200 - 5.4% share