Over the last four years, broadcasters across North America have been abandoning the traditional September-to-May TV season in favor of premiering new programs throughout the year, even during the summer season, long thought to be a ratings wasteland. For some, the new approach has quickly paid dividends, but other broadcasters continue to struggle.

This summer, CTV’s lineup has met with impressive ratings success and the Olympics has given CBC’s numbers a boost. But Global, which has been losing ground to CTV over the last few years, is continuing to find the slogging somewhat tougher.

All of the summer’s top 10, and 18 of the top-20-rated shows between June 7 and Aug 15 were CTV’s, according to 2+ data released by BBM.

The change in seasonal programming is partially due to the advent of reality TV series, which can be produced in a fraction of the time it takes for a dramatic series. In addition, broadcasters are responding to today’s changing audience, which is less likely to commit to a full 26-week season than they were several years ago.

‘The type of viewers that are watching [reality TV] only want a six-to-10-week run,’ says Dennis Dinga, a media buyer for M2 Universal. ‘It’s a younger and more affluent audience that will not commit itself to one program for 23 or 26 weeks like it did in the old days.’

According to Dinga, successful summer lineups started in June 2000, when CBS aired Survivor to great success, encouraging other casters to follow suit.

‘When you consider that there’s a 35% to 50% drop-off in audience over the summer, who in their right mind would want to launch a program then?’ says Dinga. ‘Then along comes Survivor and there is an audience, people are talking about it and they have no competition from new programming.’

Overall he is confident the strategy of releasing new shows over the summer is a good one.

‘People who do watch TV in the summer are looking for something new, and if it’s not [on conventional broadcasters], they are turning to specialty cable,’ he says.

CTV’s strategy this summer, according to Susanne Boyce, CTV’s president of programming and chair of the CTV Media Group, hinged on anchoring its schedule with audience favorites Canadian Idol 2 and a new season of The Amazing Race, which until the Olympics kicked off were the top two shows in Canada this summer.

‘Our strategy is to freshen the schedule year-round,’ says Boyce. However, she cautions, ‘You have to be careful not to put so much stuff on the air that no one knows where to find it.’

Dinga agrees, saying that a lack of stable programming at Global is partially to blame for its poor ratings performance compared to CTV, a situation he says goes beyond summer ratings.

No one from Global was available for comment.

‘Overall, I think CTV is having a much better time in the last year and currently,’ he says. In addition to the fact that Global picked up a lot of new programs last year that didn’t make it, Dinga says the broadcaster also has a lot more reality programming than CTV, which means that many of Global’s shows air for short six-, eight- or 10-week runs.

Global also aired the scripted shows The Jury, North Shore, Good Girls Don’t and Touching Evil over the summer, though none managed to crack the top 20.

‘There’s always change going on at [Global] and there’s nothing stable. When you look at CTV, they have the Law & Order franchise and the CSI franchise, which are stable. With too many new shows, there’s constant change and the viewer never knows what is going on at the station,’ Dinga explains.

When CTV decided to launch its Canadian Idol franchise last summer, Boyce says it was still a gamble, but the series was a huge success and this year Canadian Idol 2 is the top-rated show in the country, bringing in average audiences of two million viewers, a 21% jump over last year’s Idol ratings. Meanwhile, The Amazing Race drew 1.9 million viewers on average.

Boyce says she also tried to attract younger viewers by running shows such as the MTV gag show Punk’d, which drew an average audience of 888,000 viewers in its Monday 8:30 p.m. timeslot; Nip/Tuck, which brought in 851,000 viewers on average at 10 p.m. on Thursdays; and The Casino, bringing in an average 805,000 on Mondays at 9 p.m.

CTV has also generated big audiences with summer reruns of the first season of its original comedy Corner Gas, which generated an average audience of just under one million viewers during its summer timeslot on Thursdays at 8:30 p.m., positioned strategically after Canadian Idol 2’s ‘results show’ at 8 p.m., which drew an average 1.9 million viewers.

However, abandoning the traditional TV season in favor of introducing new programming throughout the year is risky, because it’s difficult to know what shows will do well in what time slots. For example, the American reality series The Casino did very poorly in the U.S. but was among the top 20 shows in Canada on CTV, partially, Boyce says, because of its position in the summer schedule.

‘It’s important to anchor your programming. Then, with the anchors in place, you can try sprinkling lots of different shows throughout the schedule,’ Boyce says.

While Global’s primetime reruns of The Simpsons represented its only show in the top 20 between June 7 and Aug. 15, according to 2+ numbers from BBM, the broadcaster fared slightly better with younger audiences.

The second season of Last Comic Standing on Global’s summer sked ranked 19th for viewers 18-49, attracting an average audience of 407,000. And in the 18-34 category, the stand-up comedy/reality show ranked 14th, drawing an average audience of more than 255,000 viewers.

Global’s Crossing Jordan, according to 2+ numbers from Nielsen Media Research, captured 4.35% of the Toronto/Hamilton market between July 19 and July 25. Fear Factor and Who Wants to Marry My Dad were in the 3% range in the same market.

-www.bbm.ca

-www.nielsenmedia.ca

-www.ctv.ca

-www.canada.com/globaltv