By now, almost everybody in Canada should be isolating at home. How has that affected TV ratings?

The assumption would be that, during the current pandemic, news channel numbers must be up year-to-year. In addition, with every major sports leagues sitting out the COVID-19 virus, TSN and Sportsnet channel ratings must be way down.

As they say in the TV ads, “Thank you, Captain Obvious.” The question is, however, how “up” and how “down”? Here’s one sample recently shared from a trusted source, based on information collected by a national data service. While it’s not the whole story and not independently verified, at the very least, it should be a reliable indicator.

The English Canada sample compares Average Minute Audience (AMA’s), across all day parts (24 hours), viewers ages 25-54 (the demo most used by advertisers). The Monday to Sunday, year-to-year sampling compares March 18 – 24, 2019 numbers with the week of March 16 – 22, 2020. This is Live data, a.k.a. “overnights.”

As one might expect, AMA viewership at all the major networks, save Citytv, are up over one year ago. A major factor are the national newscasts. While the entire CBC numbers year-to-year show only a slight bump, The National, according to separate data, is way up, helping even out declines among entertainment shows in prime and other day parts. CTV’s very robust gains in both their local evening newscasts and their CTV National News grew from an AMA of 89,190 in 2019 to 117,790 in 2020 during matching weeks in March, with Global next highest overall in English Canada with similar percentile jumps.

As for the news channels: CBC News Network made huge gains over the same period, going from an AMA of less than 10,000 viewers in 2019 to 53,450 in 2020. CP24 (from 23.51 to 48.3 in AMAs) and CTV News Channel (7.35 to 26.43) have also seen big lifts in viewership. So has BNN Bloomberg Canada, almost tripling in AMA count from 1.07 to 2.97 (000).

Read more  HERE.