We’ve received many emails in response to reports on Thursday indicating that TNA programming in the UK drew higher viewership than WWE programming. Here is a few of the responses we received:
Jason sent this in: In regards to a previous comment on WrestleView.com’s story about TNA beating WWE in the UK ratings and how both WWE’s shows are in considerably favourable time slots I thought it should be noted that RAW is shown at 2am on a Tuesday Morning (this is still LIVE though) while iMPACT is shown on Saturday night at 9pm. SmackDown is shown on the Friday night at 9pm. Therefore I think it’s highly laughable that someone suggest that iMPACT has a much more favourable timeslot than SmackDown considering Saturday nights in the UK tend to be when most people go out and by a big margin and therefore unavailable to watch television. It’s at least on par if not in an inferior timeslot however there is no doubt that RAW’s viewership number does indeed suffer from the fact it’s on at 2am.
John McNeill sent this in: It should really be noted that even though Sky Sports costs an extra 5 pounds a month (pathetically put by someone) Bravo is still on Sky which is a satellite channel and is NOT a free view channel. Would really like it if that could be noted as it is so pathetic people don’t try and make ridiculous excuses.
Phill sent this in: I just thought I’d send you more info on TNA beating WWE in the UK. It’s also worth noting that here in the UK, TNA has a regular slot (saturdays 10pm) on Bravo and this never changes yet Smackdown (on sky sports) is meant to start at 10pm on Fridays. However, Smackdown tends to get moved a lot depending on the live sports before it (ie: live cricket, golf, tennis, etc). This wouldn’t be so bad but Sky never tell us when the start time has changed. For example, a few weeks ago, SD! was meant to start at it’s usual 10pm slot, but the live cricket over-ran and it eventually started at 1.30am! Sky never made an announcement on screen or updated their listings so basically you had to just keep checking the channel to see if it had started. This has happened quite a lot over the last few months, including about 4 episodes in a row that started late with no notice of the change so obviously this could be affecting the ratings too. It makes you wonder if WWE knows that Sky are messing with their programs! Also, there has been talk recently of Sky dropping Bravo from their channels (Bravo is owned by their only competitor, Virgin Media) so if this does happen expect TNA ratings to plummet. Sky have already removed Bravo from it’s “anytime service” (the on-demand service where you can watch anything you have missed at anytime).
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