Wednesday, October 10, 2012

A guide to the ratings system in Japan - What are TV ratings?

To begin with, the question which most people, if not all would be asking is, "what exactly are ratings?" Generally, when we talk about ratings, it is with reference to the amount of households or individuals viewing a particular TV program or commercial. It does not fully reflect the value and quality of the program/commercial but is a means of judging how popular the program/commercial is.

There are two key categories of ratings here which needs to be explained i.e. the household and individual ratings. Household ratings refer to the percentage of households who turn on their TV to a particular channel at a specific time and is often the means of deriving the viewership ratings by most, if not all ratings monitoring companies like VR. On the other hand, we have the individual ratings which refer to the percentage of household members above the age of 4 watching a particular TV program. There is further segregation in terms of gender, age and occupation so it is useful in telling who has watched what program and for how long.


Another important fact to consider when you look at viewership ratings will be the fact that only viewership of programs shown via terrestrial broadcasting, broadcast satellite (BS), communication satellite (CS) and community antenna television and viewing of TV programs via computer TV services will be tracked. However, there are exclusions such as the recording and replaying of the program and viewing on mobile handsets thus it is often said in recent years that the ratings are slowly losing their relevance because they fail to take into consideration people who watch the program during the rerun slots, record it and watch at their convenience at a later time as well as people who watch programs on the go.


Next up, we'll take a look at how ratings are calculated in Japan. See you soon!

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