Nielsen has released its compendium of its “Top Ten Lists for 2008″. Among the three TV lists, there aren’t many surprises for the readers of our site. American Idol was the top regularly scheduled show, the Super Bowl was the top single telecast show, and Heroes was the top timeshifted (DVR viewed) show. I’ve reproduced the TV lists below, but download the entire report to see lists of the top Internet, Movies, DVDs, Music, Mobile, Books, Consumer Purchasing Trends, Advertisers, and Video Games rankings.
For a newbie like Fringe, I guess it’s encouraging that it gains so much DVR viewership while live airings are doing well in the younger demos. I hope it sticks around – that’s up to the writers as well as the viewers. I don’t want it to go all “Heroes” on me now!
I’m a bit confused about the timeshifting chart. Shouldn’t a show like The Office be on the list, since it usually gets a 35-40% DVR increase. Also, I recall Big Brother’s strike-necessitated winter/spring season getting a similar boost. Some CW shows also regularly get larger DVR percentage increases than many of the shows on this chart.
Mark, because of the way seasonal totals are done, for DVR viewing particularly it’s fairly worthless and not a fair comparison.
Repeats are factored into averages, but only when aired in their regularly scheduled time slots and aren’t designated as “special”. Grey’s for instance ran a lot of reruns, but most of them were on Fridays and not counted in the averages (the Thursday reruns were). Lost, aired reruns but not many (perhaps any) in its normal time slot. For the most recent Live+7 data they used, Fringe also may have had no repeats. Usually with Heroes, there are very few repeats, it just goes off the air completely for weeks.
There are no repeats with Survivor/American Idol, etc. While the Office aired a lot of normal time slot reruns.
If the list was done comparing only first-run airings, it would look very different.