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The viewership figures for the current sixth season of Idols on M-Net is outperforming any other season, the pay broadcaster tells me.
I told you right here in mid-August already that M-Net is very happy and cautiously optimistic about the record viewership for the new Idols season and now M-Net officially confirmed what I told you. I asked Pierre Cloete, M-Net's channel manager about the viewership for Idols on Sundays and Tuesdays.
''On the Sunday shows of Idols, M-Net is very, very happy with the viewership so far,'' Piere Cloete tells me. ''This is our biggest Idols season so far. The viewership outperforms any other season - even the very first season we had during Open Time. Performance wise we're very, very excited. It's probably due to the excellent singers we have on the show this year; the talent is amazing. We can see it coming through in the viewership - viewers just want to watch Idols. There's a lot of word of mouth in the industry and everyone's talking about these great singers.''
''The Tuesday Results Show of Idols as you know, was a very deliberate decision we made to move the show one day later for voting purposes. Viewer wise it hasn't really impacted the viewership for our Idols Result Shows because viewers really want to see who goes out. We are actually quite lucky that the viewership migrated quite nicely from a Monday to a Tuesday night,'' Pierre Cloete says. ''It does however give the viewers more time to vote and hopefully that will also showcase in the amount of votes we get in this sixth Idols season. We're quite happy at this stage. We obviously had to juggle the two options of trying to keep votes open as long as possible, but then running the risk of not getting the correct results - or closing it like the Americans do a little bit earlier and then getting the results out as accurately as possible. We've gone for the second option and hopefully it will pay off for us.''
