Yesterday TiVo released the results of an examination of how political party affiliation differs among top rated news and primetime programs. The results are based on viewership for July, fed by TiVo’s Stopwatch ratings service, which compiles from a consumer panel of  35,000 volunteer households.

Most of the information released is categorized by either Republican or Democrat partisanship, so it is difficult to compare how a particular program performed across party lines. The full press release detailing the viewership of 40 programs between the two parties can found here. The partisanship strength for the shows is indicated by an “index,” which I roughly equated to being the 18-49 rating divided by the rating of how many Democrat or Republican households watched the program. The following graph lays out all the results with the  18-49 rating on the horizontal axis and the partisanship index on the vertical axis. The news programs, with their relatively low ratings form a cluster on the upper left while the primetime shows form a file in the lower right.

Unsurprisingly, given current polarization, the news programs as a whole had much higher partisanship indexes than the primetime programs. What was unexpected was to see the CBS Morning News have the highest index among any of the programs. Equally unexpected was to see Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell, a program on HLN (Headline News) to have a higher ratio of Republicans in its audience than any program on Fox News, although Glenn Beck was very close behind. Among the primetime programming two shows made it into the top ten of both the Democrat and Republican indexes: The Closer and Raising the Bar, both on TNT. Perhaps TNT’s new motto should be “Where America comes together.”

Last week it was announced by much fanfare at Fox News and MSNBC that CNN had finished in third place behind the other news networks for the month of March. How is possible that the founder and brand leader for broadcast news had diminished so much in the market?

I believe that this is a result of a broad sociological change in the United States that has dramatically shifted the marketplace towards polarized political stances, ocurring in part to due voter redistricting, as explained in this Economist article from 2002. This broad shift has subsequently led consumers to prefer opinionated and almost ‘biased’ news, which first led to the rise of Fox News, and later of MSNBC. As a result, media like CNN that are less opinionated and run the middle road become the ‘alternative’ in the marketplace and risk losing audience.

Personally, I am not a constant viewer of any of these three networks, but I do find CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria to be an excellent program that always provides a distinct and serious look at current news topics. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fresh perspective.

Many media pundits are citing the impressive number of television viewers that saw Barack Obama’s Presidential inauguration. According to Nielsen 37.8 million television viewers watched at home between 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. This places Obama’s inauguration in second place to Reagan’s first inauguration in 1981 which had 41.8 million television viewers.

However, I don’t believe this truly reflects the true viewing audience since it doesn’t take into account out of home or Internet viewers. CNN alone served over 25 million streams during the entire day, and at its peak the news site saw some 1.3 million simultaneous video streams. Akamai Technologies, who hosts video streams for several web sites, reported a record of 7.7 million concurrent video streams on inauguration day. Mogulus Technologies that hosts video for C-Span and USA Today reported around 105,000 concurrent streams. As of today, other key websites with live video streaming including MSNBC, Fox News, Hulu and The New York Times have not made their traffic numbers public, but we can assume they all saw significant increases in web viewers based on information that sites like CNN forced viewers to wait in line for an available stream.

Based on my analysis of the numbers available from CNN and Akamai it can be estimated that at least 46.9 million viewers saw Obama’s.

Of course, in 1981 there was no Internet, and most people outside of their homes had to see the inauguration via television. Nielsen doesn’t offer out of home viewing for either inauguration so an ‘apples to apples’ comparison is impossible. We also need to take into account that many of the requested video streams might have originated outside of the United States, which further complicates an external analysis. There is also the matter that since 1981 the U.S. population grew by 70 million so President Elect Obama had close to a third greater potential audience. But if you consider a comparison based on total population, we’d have to tip our hat to Reagan for having captured 18.2% of the total U.S. population versus Obama’s 15.5%, based on our total viewership estimate.

Still, the figures that I am using for video streams are very conservative, since they account only for concurrent connections, and not total viewers between 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., as is the basis of Nielsen’s analysis. Furthermore, for both at home and out of home viewing, TV viewership has eroded considerably by any standard since 1981. People are much more likely now to watch or follow a live news event via the internet. Therefore I believe that internet viewership must be taken into account when considering audience levels. This is why I find it difficult to stick to the figure of 37.8 million for Obama’s inauguration. A complete comparison may be impossible given the lack of data, but what is evident is that the internet should always be tallied alongside TV viewing for important events like these.