The whole PDF is a marketing document for Free-To-Air TV aimed at potential advertises, but I presume the numbers are real.

Free TV Mid-Year Report PDF (July 2007)

Includes lots of interesting numbers.

Of the top 40 watched "regular" programs (repeats don't count):

• 4 Australian drama series
• 9 US drama/comedy series
• 16 reality/live shows
• 8 news/current affairs shows
• 2 game shows
• 1 show I couldn't categorise ("20 to 1")

I presume sport doesn't rate in this list as it deals with repeated watching and each sporting even would count as a single one-off show.

Before plasmas and LCD TVs, back when everyone had a CRT that was probably no bigger than 60cm at the most, the TV networks were really anal about what they'd let get broadcast. They had strict video quality guidelines.

Often you'd hear about footage that would never be broadcast because the quality was too bad. This was especially the case when digital video started to appear on the internet.

Fast forward to when a large portion of the nation has large TVs and high quality digital TV receivers.

Now news shows, morning chat shows, current affairs shows regularly broadcast the most awful quality videos downloaded from the internet. So many of their viewers are seeing these images with pixels bigger than their kid's heads.

We even have a new downloaded video show coming to Channel 10 to give the Big Brother Friday Night Live team something to do in between seasons, Friday Night Download.

The world is a strange place.

undercover.com.au:

Don't Look Back is a collective of gigs where artists perform their "classic" album from start to finish before an audience, and for the first time it's happening in Australia.

... with a bunch of artists I don't care about.

Which (Australian) bands/performers would you like see perform an album in it's entirety? I love it when bands perform an entire album.

Me?

• Midnight Oil, "10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1"
• The Whitlams, "Eternal Nightcap"
• Regurgitator, "Unit" or "Tu Plang" (or both!)
• Powderfinger, "Double Allergic"

In the case of "Double Allergic" I'd love to see them do the three hidden bonus tracks too (including the big pause).

And probably Silverchair's "Frogstomp" if only to watch their pain, but also to remind them that they used to write guitar riffs...

Non-Australian? Faith No More's "Angel Dust" without question. If only to see them reform, and to see "Smaller and Smaller" played live for the first time ever. But I'd pay mucho money to see Faith No More with Chuck do "Introduce Yourself", especially for "Anne's Song".

I've been thinking a Chuck era reformation of Faith No More is more likely though. Then they could repeat the evolution of the band throughout the show, kicking out Chuck for Patton, then kicking out Jim for Trey, followed by Dean, then Jon.

In April next year it will have been a decade since Faith No More broke up and 25 years since their formation.

I thought I'd do some comparisons of ratings for Heroes, a show a recent article suggested was "flopping" compared to fluff shows like Dancing With The Stars.

In the Ratings section of the Heroes Wikipedia article, it says this on America:

Heroes was NBC's top-rated scripted show for the 2006-2007 television season, and the most successful of the shows debuting in that period. It ranked twenty-first in the ratings, with an average of 14.3 million viewers in the United States.

US population is around 303 million 14.3/303 = 4.7%.

Australia's population is around 21 million.

Australia: The first season aired on the Seven Network Wednesday nights at 8:30 pm. The series debuted strongly, attracting more than 2 million viewers in the five capital cities. Viewership settled closer to 1 million nearing the end of the first season and the show was moved to Thursdays at 8:30 pm, successfully attracting more viewers

From a Sydney Morning Herald blog post of TV watching this year:

Heroes (7) opened its latest season with 1.2 million and last week was down to 934,000. Bionic Woman (7) opened with 1.6 million, and last week was down to 1.0 million. Without A Trace (9) was getting audiences above 1.3 million two years ago. Last week it got 949,000.

Let's assume around an average of around 0.95m viewers for Heroes (last week). 0.95/21m = 4.5%

On percentage of population, they both rate pretty well the same.

More people watched Heroes than watched the Leaders Debate.

How's this for a question... are less people overall watching TV? Or are people watching less TV? Note, it seems that Australia's rating system ozTAM only rates national capitals. What do regional viewers watch? They don't appear to count...

Right now there are two shows I enjoy watching on at 9:30 at night, and that is just too darn late. I've stayed up and watched them the last two weeks due to the extra novelty of watching on the new widescreen, but I'll probably tape them next week.

Taped shows don't count in the ratings either. The ozTAM "peoplemeter" only counts viewing when the TV is on. How many people tape shows? More and more and more...