The reach of TV channels

Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World

“…Specifically, whereas the station captured a 6.3 market share across all viewers, the few who actually tuned in spent 37.6% of their time with the station. This was consistent with an earlier study by Barwise and Ehrenberg (1984), also using local market data, that found minority-language and religious stations enjoyed abnormally high time-spent-viewing (TSV) levels despite their otherwise limited reach. Barwise and Ehrenberg, however, argued that these were exceptional cases, and that their main finding was one of "double jeopardy."…”

“…This is directly at odds with the intuitively appealing notion that small audiences tend to be composed of die-hard fans, the so-called small-but-loyal audience. Indeed, several more general studies of audience behavior that have operationalized audience loyalty as either TSV (Barnes, 1990;Barwise & Ehrenberg, 1984) or repeatviewing (Ehrenberg & Wakshlag, 1987;Webster & Wang, 1992) have indicated that double jeopardy is the rule, not the exception. If this phenomenon holds up in the multichannel environment, it suggests a limited potential for audience polarization.…”

Television Viewing Preferences: Programs, Schedules, and the Structure of Viewing Choices Made by Israeli Adults

“…Thus, there is little research relating to language as a factor in viewer choices. Barwise and Ehrenberg (1984) suggest that polyglot channels in the U.S. have very small but quite loyal market shares. This is in marked contrast to the general rule of double jeopardy found by these authors suggesting that viewers of channels with small market shares are less loyal.…”

The social significance of VCR technology: TV or not TV?

“…In other words, these audiences watch selected "types" of pre-recorded videotapes or certain cable channels either heavily of not at all (Levy &Fink 1984 andHeeter &Greenberg 1985 respectively). In marked contradiction network TV has few such loyal fans or followers amongst their audience (Barwise &Ehrenberg 1984 andGoodhardt et al 1975). Webster (1986) describes Arbitron research conducted in 1982 on the audience for cable channels.…”