Food for thought (part II)

We continue with the second installment in our series of articles concerning the TV ratings of the America's Cup. These are meant to be simple tools that will further help the evolution of this great event. Just like any other media we are working towards better coverage and it is obvious the more popular it becomes the better it is for anyone involved.

Analyzing the French TV market has become tremendously easier since two days ago, but first a little background. One of the country's largest telecom groups, Iliad, provides a combined internet+telephone+TV service through an ADSL line, called Free. This combined offer has been considerably successful and a million households are now subscribers.

Since two days ago it is possible to know in real time (with only a 30-second delay) what these households are watching. Free has put up on the internet the ratings of its top 12 TV networks, updated every 30 seconds. This website can be reached here. As you can see, the top 12 TV networks are sorted in a descending order according to their ratings at the moment. To our knowledge, it is the first time such a tool exists.

By clicking on a TV network, one gets extremely useful graphs on the viewership trends during different periods of times. As a result it is very easy to see if a particular show created more interest than the regular watching patterns. The network carrying the America's Cup in France is CANAL+ and by using the one-week graph during the Louis Vuitton Acts in Trapani one will get a quite acurrate overview.

Caveat emptor: The sample is not representative of the whole French population. It consists of 1 million households, almost entirely in urban areas, but it can give an interesting reading. Do the urban, more affluent French viewers change their viewing patterns during the America's Cup?

Recapitulation: Link to the Italian TV ratings, with a one-day delay. Link to real-time TV ratings of 1 million French households.