​The Fox broadcast network made a bold move right before Thanksgiving: it announced it would no longer provide the press with next-day ratings.

For anyone not following the day-to-day of broadcast television, this may seem like no big deal, but to those engaged with the business of broadcasting, this is a throwing down of the gauntlet, if you will.

For most of television’s history, series and network success has been measured by how they did the night before. But with the arrival of the digital video recorder (DVR), subscription video on demand (SVOD) and binge-viewing, the relevance of a show’s overnight is increasingly waning. The currency of the television industry is currently live-plus-three-day ratings, based on how in-program commercials perform after three days of viewing. The other broadcast networks still provide next-day numbers, although most of them also provide delayed viewing numbers and constantly remind reporters that the overnights are no longer that telling. That said, Fox is the first broadcast network to just stop providing overnights altogether, although both FX and USA also have ceased that practice on the cable side.

Fox Television Group Co-Chairmen Dana Walden and Gary Newman informed the world of their decision in a letter saying it’s time to “change the conversation” about ratings since so much viewing occurs from DVR playback, video on demand and online streaming platforms – “none of which are included in Nielsen’s fast nationals.”

“Fox is a company that has always prided itself on being forward-thinking,” Walden and Newman wrote, “… and nothing could be more antiquated than a decades-old measurement that reflects only a portion of our audience.”

There’s a good reason for wanting to hold off: Fox sees a 44% gain in its shows’ ratings when it waits three days. And all of the networks can claim large bumps when delayed viewing is taken into consideration. CBS’ own Limitless sees its audience grow by 78% in the seven days after it airs, and CBS has been vocal with CEO Leslie Moonves even pushing the industry to move to live-plus-seven day ratings.

That said, there’s also value in seeing how shows do after they air live. TV’s biggest shows, including Fox’s own Empire and AMC’s The Walking Dead, pull in huge live-plus-same-day ratings as well as huge audiences days later.

“[Overnight ratings] still serve as a guide as to how a show is ranked on a given night or how it performed versus last season,” said Billie Gold, vice president and director of programming research for Amplifi US, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Still, the trend seems to be moving away from reporting overnight ratings. While that makes sense from the networks’ point of view, three-day-old news usually feels pretty stale.

Brief Take: While walking away from overnight ratings makes perfect sense in this age of on-demand viewing, what the industry really needs is an easy way to understand and report total multi-platform performance on a next-day basis.

Read more in The Los Angeles Times

[Image courtesy of Ed Araquel/Fox]

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