[DTV]

Audience figures haven't cropped up in a while, so I thought I'd look at how things were going. Surprised it wasn't mentioned that Sky's audience share in September was 86% of BBC News', which I believe must be Sky's best relative performance since a brief relative surge during the Brexit referendum campaign. Nonetheless, it appears to have been a bit of a blip - although October has seen a boost for both news channels, the year-on-year performance for both is near identical (BBC / Sky):

Reach: -20% / -18%
Share: -24% / -24%
Average Minutes: -26% / -26%

Things are a bit better relatively for Sky looking across the whole period since the merger (and the same period the previous year), but the decline is still apparent across both. Basically, fewer people are watching less of both news channels, but are relatively sticking with Sky a little longer.

Reach: -20% / -16%
Share: -32% / -22%
Average Minutes: -34% / -24%

While this is obviously against a backdrop of wider decline in TV viewing, average minutes for all channels is actually down only 2% year-on-year, so it's clearly a localised decline for news channels. A large chunk of this is arguably reversion to the mean - Covid and Ukraine were both a real boost for both channels and the share figures for both channels would be typical for 2019 and before. Ultimately, though, it would seem that, while the merger has cost the BBC a bit of relative ground, it's audience hasn't really fallen by much more than it would have anyway.