Nine’s Top Gear audience falls below when it was on SBS

Last nights episode was a repeat.

I’m absolutely certain last night’s episode was a repeat. Also, die-hard fans are not going to wait for Ch 9 to get their act into gear (excuse the pun) when the shows are available almost immediately after airing in the UK. These TV execs really need to get their heads around this concept…

It’s worth looking at the number of viewers that could be using the Internet to catch the latest episodes soon as they have been aired in the UK. According to the Channel 9 website Series 16 started airing early February 2011, where in the UK they were close to finishing off the same series.

If Channel 9 wants to increase the viewer ship they need to find a way to bring the show closer to an airing with the UK version

Did SBS manage the ‘fast-track’ issue any better during their time than 9 is now? The confusing mix of old and new episodes isn’t helping either but I’d be interested to know.

Definitely a repeat.

How they get away with marketing it as all new is beyond me.

It’s new to Nine, but not new (old, even) to every other person with half a brain.

9’s previous excuse was that it’s a NEW episode for 9. Presumably like the previous 10years worth of episodes.

Why don’t they just air an image of someone giving the finger with a caption saying, “We hate you!”? That way viewers might feel like 9 has less contempt for them.

I don’t think this was an old episode actually. I seem to recall the Oz series 2 episode 1 featuring the Ashes challenge, but don’t recall all the other footage in last night’s episode. Maybe the UK version delayed including the Oz element?

May it needs Eddie Mcguire on it… I don’t think he is on enough Channel 9 programs yet.

Be interesting to see if the numbers dropped off through the show, given it was on for an hour and a half with an ad break every 15 mins. How anyone can watch it live is beyond me…

The audience is predominantly male, tech savvy and time poor.

So 9 put it on a Tuesday night, on an SD channel, against strong general entertainment shows, long after it was aired and available via torrents in HD surround in the UK.

They deserve everything they don’t get. Which appears to be their audience and hence ratings.

People have seen it – the unique english humour becomes less amusing every time Nine repaet it – besides die-hard fans have all the eps on their iPod now. They can choose which one they want to see and when…

I think a lot of people are slowly turning off….the show is more about the hosts than the cars

Is it Channel 9, or is it just that viewers are just over these over fed, over exposed bunch of pretentious twats?

I must admit I get confused with “new” and “repeat” episodes.

And to say an episode is “new” because it is “new to Nine” has to be false advertising…that’s if Nine is saying that.

Dear 9: quit screwing around pretending your episodes are ‘new’ and maybe you could lure me back, but in the meantime i’ve taken to buying just the episodes I want on AppleTV.

Maybe people are just Top Gear’ed out, 16 series is a lot, plus they were just here doing the live show, Nine repeat the living daylights out of them across Nine & Go, there’s a magazine, they’re in the papers, they’re all over the internet etc etc etc etc etc – overkill is a real thing…same thing will happen to cooking shows this year I expect too.

Pretty sure this wasnt a repeat, they referenced the QLD and Vic floods in the last scene – thats fairly current.

@ Mike, it’s a f%$king repeat!
Don’t defend the indefensible.
Channel Nien, you reap what you sow.

It’s virtually unwatchable, as greedy Nine crams ads in where they’re never meant to be. They cut in in the middle of sentences, interviews….it’s so crass. And there’s approximately 25 minutes of TVCs crammed into a 1 hour format show, so the pace is ruined. That’s why nobody watches free to air anymore – record and zap, or simply download the episodes from the net for free.

channel 9… still the one losing all the good talent to other stations, killing programs via constant repeats and p!ssing viewers off by treating them with contempt. The promo and programming dept of 9 should all be lined up and shot!!

I am with you Mike – way too many ads, being so drawn out now it lost its thrill!

It’s failing on Ch9 because they treat any loyal show viewers like morons:
constant timeslot changes, swapping the order of eps around to suit 9’s programming – the US special was actually the 1st of the 16th series, before the Middle east special, but they repeated it again to promote the terrible local version’s new series.
They break up the show in the middle of interviews, middle of segments, with ad breaks… a one hour show is now 1.5 hours long. They make it unwatchable. It’s no wonder fans who are used to watching it on SBS are probably just downloading it from the UK as soon as it’s aired…

@ repeat claims, Rob Stu etc. Okay if this is a repeat can someone tell me where and when from? The last couple of minutes they talk about the floods. That gives it a window of 6 weeks. So when and where was this shown on TV in Australia??

Uhg I love Top Gear but Ch9 have destroyed it. Bad edit cuts to cram in loads of ads and repeats. I’ve stopped watching it now and so has my hubby. The magazine is just as bad, sooooo many ads! Understandable that ad revenue needs to happen but not at the cost of the integrity of the product.

Yes it was new for UK, but included the Ashes contest that we had seen on TG Australia. Its certainly hard to to know what you’re going to get each week. Old Top Gear episodes are also shown on at least three Foxtel channels so the franchise is getting flogged to death. I’ll watch the first few minutes and if its a repeat, I’ll switch off.

@Dan – Totally agreed, the show is great when it is show in sequence and not moved around to different timeslots on a weekly basis. How are you meant to make an appointment to view when you dont know what time it will be on.

Same old store I guess, channel nine take something that is a golden egg, promote it for 3 months, think the audience is never going to go anywhere, and then destroy a good thing.

Get it back to SBS where they know how to treat an audience, especially by not stuffing 20 minutes of ads into the program because they can charge a loading

100% better on sbs, so lame on channel 9 even to the point I do not even watch it. I have no patience for 5 minutes of footage followed by 6 minutes of ads.

Listen up Channel 9.

You and your identical twin 7, treat your viewers with comtept…..badly interrupted quality shows with ad breaks every 2 minutes. In addition, please inform me of who is demanding to see your trivial news updates, during a programs they tune in for.
I think you would find, with minimal research, that the audience that TG attracts will get their news from more worthy sources. So stop the interruptions and start your programs at the advertised time.

Also:

Too many Ads = loss of viewers = less demand from advertisers.

Lowering Ads = more viewers = increased demand from advertisers = higher rates and yields.

Your customer is the viewer not the advertisers. Advertisers follow audiences!!

Oh and to echo comments previously, TG fans know whats a new episode or not.

Grrr

It was a sad day when SBS lost Top Gear. Nine has completely ruined what was a cult program. Changing its timeslot from Monday to Tuesday nights was sacrilegious; cramming it with crappy ads for the masses is infuriating, and playing repeat episodes whilst claiming they’re “All New” is just a plain bullsh!t.

I’d rather pay for the latest ad-free version on iTunes than watch it for free on Nine.

As for Top Gear Australia… don’t even get me started!!

@K.Watson – feel like a fool now?

@K. Watson So where is it @#$%ing repeat from then? It’s BBC 2011 product and Clarkson mentions the floods of 6 weeks ago. Just keen to see it earlier if you have the inside running. Elementary my dear watson.

Kids,
K Watson has a strong history of firmly grasping the wrong end of the stick.

Not just K Watson. There were a few others screaming Rpt. Not many coming back to say where they saw it on Australian TV.

And as for crying too many ads. Well I hands up acknowledge conflict of interest first. That’s how I feed my kids. No one seems to scream that in packed to the rafters that as lower the latest coffin they fade to a life insurance break. People the writers are asked space stories for commercial breaks. Biggest loser, MKR Master Chef all patterned for commercials. Get over it please. I thought it was the poms who were supposed to be thw whingers.

Bit of a theme running here. Repeat or not I also can’t stand the frequency of ads on this show. We all know why they are there but 30% of a show being ad time? We’re having to record it and skip ads or get it from elsewhere.

Top Gear’s uniqueness was that it was a show about cars (usually a bogan subject) that non-bogans also enjoyed.

Hence it’s wide appeal.

When it was on SBS, bogans would seek it out because they love all things bogan. And non-bogans would also watch it there too, because it’s on SBS.

But Channel 9 is the Bogan Entertainment Network, so it’d be mostly bogans watching Top Gear on 9 now. No self-respecting NonBogan would go anywhere near 9.

Not surprised at all at the reduced audience.

Last night’s wasn’t technically a repeat – it was the same content (Ashes) re-cut for the UK market. We saw a different edit last year.

Most TGUK fans watch the new episodes here in Aus the night after they air in the UK – they are available for download in HD a few hours after they run on BBC2.

Alan Jones are you the know all from the radio station?

OK kids. I am a top gear and fan and the deal is this.

Channel 9 aired a special “ashes” episode around the time of that spectacularly brilliant “Warnie” programme. This episode was all about the 3 idiots from the Oz top gear show going to England. So they went over and did a whole stack of stunts. This is where you would have seen the footage previously.

BBC in the UK aired this episode about 6 weeks ago. It was a normal episode of top gear where they used footage from the “ashes” Australian special as the stunt for the show. This was footage never seen before in the UK, and It’s also why they had up to date references to the ashes and the queensland floods.

So Channel 9 is correct. It is an all new top gear. It’s just an all new top gear direct from the UK full of recycled content from the Aussie special that we saw here about 3 months back.

Interestingly, Channel 9 have a unique ability to turn a 50minute episode (no ads) into a 90 minute episode once ads are counted! In addition the episode aired last night was cut quite significantly from the UK version! So it may have been more like 45 mins of content not sure there.

Anyhow I agree with the Australian population. Channel 9 are ruining the show. It’s pretty much unwatchable with all the ads channel 9 throw into it.

Ironically, it’s so bad that all the die hard top Gear fans just download it from the internet. The contempt shown by 9 programmers just exacerbates the flight from FTA.

The ad breaks are so frequent and so badly timed – as in, halfway through a question asked of the Star in the Reasonably Priced car – that is completely ruins the continuity of the show. I love Top Gear but the only way we watch it in my household now it’s not on SBS is to pre-record it and fast forward through all the ads later so you can at least get some sense of a continuous program.

FTA are killing themselves slowly. If you have the internet you can download and watch without the ad interruptions. If you have Foxtel, you IQ the show and fast forward all ads. Those who don’t use either are the ones who will watch the shows live, and the number of luddites in society is ever decreasing. Besides live sport, I have zero need to watch FTA in real time. Soon will be the days when FTA is a thing of the past and the Ch9’s of this world will have become nothing more than another local production house trying to flog their shows to cable TV providers and their networks.

“Most TGUK fans watch the new episodes here in Aus the night after they air in the UK”

– Big call, not likely very accurate.

How do you think that the BBC pays Jeremy Clarkson enough to order a new Lambo on a Whim? FTA networks across the world pay big dollars for the content. No big dollars from the networks, then you are going to have to pay for the content or it won’t be there! I am sure you don’t go to work for nothing and I can assure you the astute Mr Clarkson goes nowhere for nothing. So shut up about the ads or you will need to start trumping up for content.

You can always rely on Channel 9 to royally **** up something that has either previously worked well for them or another station. Just what is going on at Channel 9 these days? They seem so bereft of ideas that as soon as they get something that looks like it’s got some life in it, they simply show it ad nauseum (literally) until the show becomes impossible to watch/follow and viewers simply give up.

What would Kerry think?

@R Mugobme. Happy to pay for content without ads. Top gear is the sort of program that people probably would.

It would work out a lot cheaper, especially without the overheads that the likes of Ch9 would add to the cost of a BBC production.

At $1 Mr Clarkson would make more coin and the viewing experience wouldn’t be ruined. (Based on Top gear being the most downloaded torrent file on the planet apparently – and the show claiming a global audience of 300 or 500million people an episode. It’s some bonkers number like that.)

@Ben

Actually I suspect that is a mildly accurate statement. Bear in mind the universe that they are talking about here is diehard fans of the UK version of top gear based in Australia.

My point being that not a huge proportion of the 647,000 could be classified as “die hard fans”. If 10% of that number were the TGUK fans , you would need 30,000 – 50,000 downloads in oz to make that statement true.

Don’t care much either way. Cant believe I bothered posting a response.

Yes, last night’s episode was a repeat, dispite 9’s claims it was “new” in all its promo spots, but more importantly, I watched in Adelaide and the broadcast was an utter shambles. The exit from Currenta ffair went to exactly a minute of audio from the early morning news, followed by almost a minute of black. There were four further cuts, not fades, to black through the show and on two occasions, commercial breaks arrived mid sentence. The idea of automation is to simplify broadcast so that relatively junior operators can run multi channel outlets, but if this is the best 9/Win can do, then they should learn about pre-roll and traffic/ playout system integration. No other indusrty would accept such poor performance. deliberate lies to consumers (misrepresentation of programme content) and …. that is to say nothing about the regular and constant digital freezes that our friends in the southern capital apparantly endure. Why wouldn’t audiences halve? If 9/win don’t pick up their game quickly, very quickly, they can expect it to halve again.

@ carrob If you can prove that people will pay for content then I think I know someone very interested in speaking to you. Because despite his enormous resources, getting people to pay for content is really hurting rupert.

Top Gear has become the world-wide phenomenon it is today for one very simple reason – illegal downloads. Clarkson, Hammond and May, as well as the producers, realised they were onto something about 5 years ago when bittorrents hit the mainstream, and they quietly encouraged their global fans to ‘steal’ the show from the BBC. Andy Millman, the shows executive producer, would even pop up on bulletin boards dedicated to distributing Top Gear torrents, answering fan questions, and the hosts would routinely ‘chastise’ their illegal audience on the show for downloading it off ‘the tubes’.

The net result is that Top Gear has become one of the BBC’s biggest money spinners, and the hosts now have a global audience to which to sell books, DVDs, T-Shirts, and of course over-priced tickets to live stadium shows to.

The upshot of all that downloading is that Channel Nine is left holding a very expensive, but hollow, prize – but they should have realised that before they nicked it off SBS.

In addition to the excessive advertising, there’s another factor not helping Nine’s ratings – Top Gear has jumped the shark and has begun it’s inevitable demise… a fact that even the show’s EP acknowledges.

@ alan jones – I looked at your credentials. Communications and strategy huh? I wouldn’t want to be your client. Don’t just assume you know without at least checking (especially when you link to your site). Sorry mate, but I’m afraid you are just another fool.

Technically, if Nine haven’t shown the episode before then it isn’t a repeat (no channel is responsible for tracking the other networks). Such episodes are generally promoted as “network premiere” or something similar. If you see “Australian premiere” it means one of the other networks have not shown it.

There is also a simple reason why Nine is not hot-on-the-heels of the UK broadcasts – they are honouring their broadcast contracts. Basically, there are “broadcast windows”. The people that make the programme (several million dollars each) retain the window in order to maximise the recoupment from their investment – this would include ad revenue from (legal) download and streaming sites.

Nine has to put in lots of repeats because the BBC only made 7 programmes last year and there are 40 weeks of TV to fill each year.

The simply fact is that it was an already tired format when Nine bought the show.

Perhaps it it because they are running out of interesting cars?
They should send Jeremy Clarkson to the Paris fashion shows instead.
I would watch that!

Is Top Gear a show about narcotics? Or is that border control?