7 Responses to “Nielsen Cable Network Coverage Estimates”

1. Julia says:

   May 6, 2008 at 10:30 pm

   Since it was a topic of discussion in a previous post, do you have the coverage data for the big nets?
2. Julia says:

   May 6, 2008 at 10:30 pm

   Oh, and CW.
3. Robert Seidman says:

   May 6, 2008 at 10:43 pm

   Julia, if I had it, I would post it. I'd always assumed the big four were as close to 100% (perhaps a little less for FOX) as possible. I don't make that assumption with the CW because I've read countless times that they don't have as much coverage now as the CW that the WB and UPN had combined prior to consolidating. But what the coverage estimates are, I don't know.
4. Statlc says:

   May 6, 2008 at 11:57 pm

   I don't get the Showtime coverage. Do they have 20 million or 18 million? Or are the 18 million the additional SHO channels?

   Still, that's alot more compared to when Dexter S2 finished when it was arround 15-16 million. I wonder if we'll ever see 2+million numbers for Dexter.
5. Robert Seidman says:

   May 7, 2008 at 12:29 am

   Stalc, it actually is very confusing — it's not you. The easiest thing to do for the primary HBO and Showtime Channels is use HBO Prime and Showtime Prime. I suspect it's just poorly reported data (not necessarily wrong, just confusing categorizations) and that's probably as much on the networks as Nielsen.

   I know that there are only around ~31 million people who could've watched HBO's John Adams (HBO is not in 62+ million homes so you can't add up HBO “The Works” and HBO Prime). What HBO's “The Works” actually is, is different things depending on who your service provider is. HBO offers multiplexing of up to 15 channels (including the Cinemax variants, but not including the HD simulcasts).

   The gap with Showtime makes more sense to me. Showtime the primary channel is in 18.3 million homes, but has total subscribers for its multiplexing, including The Movie Channel and FLIX of 20+ million (which includes the 18.3 million in Showtime Prime).

   It does not surprise me that only ~2 million would subscribe to Showtime's multiplexing services, while 18.3 million get just Showtime.

   It would surprise me greatly if only ~250K are subscribed to some variant of HBO's multiplex service, so that must be counting total subscribers to HBO services period, of which, almost all of them have HBO.

   You'll notice that Cinemax, FLIX, The Movie Channel etc are not in the table but I think it winds up this way now because it's really hard to buy HBO without getting something else!

   Sorry if the explanation is as confusing as the data
6. dave says:

   May 7, 2008 at 8:05 am

   For being the Network of the NHL. Versus has pathetic coverage.

   How come cartoon network and adult swim are listed separately here?
   Same thing with Nick/Nick at Nite

   Fox news has smaller coverage than cnn and headline news, but that doesn't seem to matter in ratings.
7. Robert Seidman says:

   May 7, 2008 at 10:01 am

   Dave, Nick/NAN, Cartoon/Adult Swim are separated because although it's “one network”, they're treated as and reported on as separate entities in the weekly reports by Nielsen. This is based on the networks' wishes, and not an arbitrary decision by Nielsen.