My How TV Ratings Have Changed
I’m a big fan of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX. I didn’t start watching the show 
until earlier this year. But I then bought both seasons one and two from Amazon’s on-demand service
So I was dismayed last night when reading that it’s unlikely to return for a third season. Which got me curious about the show’s ratings.
I used to be fairly informed about the entertainment business. Well television, movies, and music at any rate. I’ve never known much about the theater. A long time ago I had this idea I wanted to buy a television network (a story for another day). So I set about educating myself on the business.
I subscribed to Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard. I read Broadcasting and Cable regularly as well, although I never had a subscription. I remember being frustrated with Variety’s film database because while it provided gross sales it did not include production budgets which made the grosses somewhat less useful. When IMDB Pro launched I was thrilled that they had that data and subscribed. And yes I know that you still need to account for marketing budgets, backend participation, etc. but it gives you a starting point. Anyway, the point is that I was fairly knowledgable about how the industry worked.
But when I left California and moved back to the east coast in 2003 I stopped paying attention to 
all that. I let my trade subscriptions lapse and focused my energies on other things. Which brings me back to last night and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
I found a bunch of forum posts speculating that the show is likely to be canceled and encouraging fans to participate in online polls, email campaigns, and the like. But I don’t know of many shows to be renewed based on that kind of thing. And by not many I mean Party of Five. That’s the only case I can think of where that kind of thing worked.
Broadcast television is a business and the revenue model is advertising. There’s money to be made in syndication and DVD sales which is nice for the production company but the network needs to make the advertising money. I’m a bit out of the loop so I don’t know if online sales through channels such as Amazon and Apple or DVD sales are split with the network but I’d imagine most or all of that is going to the production company.
So I went to look at the Terminator ratings. Because I no longer have any trade subscriptions I searched for a free ratings site which lead me to TV by the Numbers which is my new favorite web site. It’s an awesome free resource. How they are allowed to republish so much of Nielsen’s data I have no idea but it’s great!
But in looking at the ratings and commentary I was a bit lost. When I used to look at the overnights in Variety it was pretty straightforward – rating and share. But now there’s Live+7, Live+3, Live+SD, and talk of C+3. What is all this stuff? Where did it come from? We didn’t have any of that back in the old days of…6 years ago.
I don’t like feeling so out of the loop so I did some digging. It turns out that DVR viewing is now measured by Nielsen. The Live+7 numbers reflect everyone who watched the show in its broadcast time slot as well as everyone who watched it on their DVR within a week of its air date. Live+3 is within 3 days. And Live+SD is for live plus same day viewing, which is apparently most common for reality TV.
Nielsen also now offers something called C+3 where they measure the ratings (viewing) of individual commercials for the live broadcast plus 3-day DVR viewing. Most importantly the upfront ad sales are based on this C+3 data. Again, this is not how things worked in the fairly recent past.
It was an educational experience and a great opportunity for me to bring my TV ratings knowledge up to date. And now yours is as well.
Unfortunately the result of all this research was that the ratings for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are not great, even counting DVR viewers. Although the full year ratings counting its former Monday time slot aren’t horrible compared to FOX’s network average.
My hope is that the Terminator Salvation movie has a really strong opening weekend. I think that’s probably the best shot for a third season at this point. But I emailed FOX my support email anyway. Can’t hurt.