Share This year’s Super Bowl broke records both within audience levels and ad pricing. On average 111 million viewers watched the 2011 Super Bowl, besting the previous year’s then record audience of 106.5 million. This year’s audience growth of 4.2% is above the average 2.8% growth that event has seen since 1968 but is lower [...]

Share Sometimes the big just keep getting bigger. This has traditionally been the case with Univision and their latest online moves are pretty big. The company already ranks as the top U.S. Hispanic property, almost double the users of the closest competitor. dtsv.dtse_post_2222_permalink = ‘http://betweenthescreens.com/2010/10/online-gigante/’; dtsv.dtse_post_2222_title = ‘Online Gigante’;

Share Last week Steve Jobs presented a new version of the Apple TV device and announced that it would stream only rented content and that TV episodes would be available at a lower price point of $0.99. With these changes Apple addressed weak points in its video strategy, which had caused lackluster sales. However, while [...]

Share The Emmys broadcast last Sunday on NBC attracted 13.5 million viewers, making it the largest non-sports audience so far in 2010, at least since the airing of FOX’s American Idol finale on May 26. This is also the largest audience the Emmys has had in four years but it’s still over a quarter less than [...]

Share Two telenovelas have made waves recently in the U.S., for each of the major Hispanic broadcasters. ¿Dónde está Elisa?, based on a Chilean soap of the same name, aired on Telemundo at 10 p.m. between March and August and improved the ratings for the time period 30% over the previous telenovela, Los Victorinos. Elisa [...]

Share Last week the fourth season of Mad Men premiered and while the episode was entertaining as always (I am a fan) the ratings were a mere 5% above last season’s premiere. This growth was also significantly lower than previous season premieres: 167% from Season 1 to 2, and 44% from Season 2 to 3. [...]

Share The World Cup is almost into the second round but the real competition might be taking place behind the cameras, between the broadcasters. In the U.S., two companies have television broadcast rights: Disney (ABC and ESPN) has the English-language rights and Univision (Univision, Telefutura and Galavision) has the Spanish-language rights. It was expected that Unvision [...]

Share Two weeks ago ABC broadcast the final episode of Lost, a popular show that whose ratings I’ve been posting about every now and then. The last episode tallied 13.5 million viewers, which was more viewers than the season’s premiere (something that hasn’t happened since the first season) and the most viewers for any episode [...]

Share Although I really love my new job in online advertising sales, as I previously worked for 12 years in TV, I am still irked when I hear media pundits declare the inevitability of television’s demise. It was thus with some sense of reassurance and satisfaction that I recently read the positive report by The Economist of [...]

Share I wanted to follow my last post on U.S. Spanish language TV ratings by focusing just on telenovelas, and how their similar storylines draw similar audience flows. This analysis is based on the same data as the previous post, a consolidation of household (HH) ratings data from archived newsletters, dating back to April 3, [...]