Married at First Sight isn’t just a hit with ‘live’ overnight audiences, but it is dominating in video playouts too.
Since February 2016 OzTAM has been measuring Video Play Measurement, a complex measurement of devices and duration of video, on tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, games consoles and PCs / laptops.
This differs from Timeshifted viewing which measures catch-up on PVRs.
OzTAM measures its VPM across both 7 and 28 day periods anywhere in Australia (not just 5 city metro).
In the last 28 days, Nine’s reality series completely dominated the VPM landscape, nabbing the entire Top Ten shows with a VPM rating as high as 166,000.
That means episode 10 attracted 11,788,000 total minutes played, which is divided by the content length of 71 mins (11,788,000 ÷ 71 = 166,000 rounded).
The episode also had 410,000 stream starts -but that can’t be counted as an individual viewer because some people may have started streams repeatedly due to disconnections etc.
Over the last 28 days of data nine other episodes of Married ruled in VPM too (between 166,000 – 111,000), with no other network coming close.
It wasn’t My Kitchen Rules that pulled the best VPM for Seven, but Home and Away, as high as 83,000, meanwhile This is Us was the most popular VPM title for TEN, at 67,000 and Vikings for SBS on 37,000.
ABC’s younger viewers showed the strength of younger viewers with Fireman Sam at 85,000, Broadchurch was 76,000 and Newton’s Law up to 66,000.
But there is also an important distinction that must be made in VPM: OzTAM tallies rolling data over a 28 day period -meaning Broadchurch attracted its figure in a much briefer window than other titles. This makes it hard to stack up the numbers side by side as we can in Overnight rankings.
In Pay TV, Big Little Lies drew a VPM of 24,000 (another title that has had a brief window), while The Real Housewives of Sydney was 18,000.
Meanwhile Timeshifted (or Consolidated) figures continue to demonstrate the way audiences are viewing content, , with dramas continuing to dominate.
While 800 Words drew 639,000 Overnight viewers on February 28, a massive 206,000 audience watched it in the 7 days thereafter. That’s another third of its audience.
Here is a snapshot of how some other titles increased in +7 day viewing on PVRs:
800 Words 206,000
Gogglebox 159,000
Married at First Sight 147,000
House Husbands 141,000
Broadchurch 138,000
NCIS 120,000
Call the Midwife 117,000
My Kitchen Rules 114,000
Vera 110,000
The Blacklist 109,000
Murder Uncovered 105,000
Bull 103,000
This is Us 103,000
Newton’s Law 92,000
NCIS: LA 85,000
Black Work 81,000
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here Elimination 81,000
Death in Paradise 76,000
Bride and Prejudice 74,000
Planet Earth II 73,000
Travel Guides 67,000
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here 62,000
Home and Away 61,000
In 2017, the numbers to judge a show’s performance now includes:
Overnight rankings (Total People)
Demographics (especially 18-49, 25-54).
Timeshifted 7 days
Timeshifted 28 days
VPM 7 days
VPM 28 days
Regional viewers
You can read more on VPM and see daily reports here.
Timeshifted data is published on TV Tonight here.
What is a ‘VPM rating’?
A VPM (Video Player Measurement) rating is the total minutes of a program played across all
connected devices divided by the content length and rounded to the nearest thousand. You can also think of this as the average number of connected devices playing the content across the program’s duration, which is similar to the way television program average audiences are calculated, albeit for devices rather than people in the VPM Report.
© OzTAM Pty Limited Video Player Measurement (VPM) coverage: 14/02/2017 – 13/03/2017.