Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

missdaredevil · Joined: 08 Dec 2004 Posts: 1670 Location: Ask me

How is the *view rate* of the TV program.
I s that the right term?

bud · Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 2111 Location: New Jersey, US

"Ratings" is the usual term. "Audience share" is another term common within the industry.

missdaredevil · Joined: 08 Dec 2004 Posts: 1670 Location: Ask me

What about the *number of people that have viewed the show*?

Thanks

bud · Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 2111 Location: New Jersey, US

I'm not sure that I understand your question. Ratings (audience share) is a measurement of the number of people that have viewed the show.

Maybe you mean over the life of a show - for example, over the life of the "Friends" sitcom? In that case, as far as I'm aware, they'd use the same terms. Except, of course, they couldn't say that the ratings for "Friends" were 30%. They'd have to talk about trends. Something like: For the first five years, the ratings for "Friends" were consistently in the low 30's. For the next two years, they fell a little to the high 20's. ...

Does that answer your question?

kerstin · Joined: 30 May 2006 Posts: 241 Location: Taiwan

Sorry, you were right.
I had it confused with the other term, something that concerns PG-rated...
By the way, is that called approval rating?
Thanks

kerstin · Joined: 30 May 2006 Posts: 241 Location: Taiwan

By the way, why is ratings plural?

Thanks

bud · Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 2111 Location: New Jersey, US

When we talk about TV/Radio ratings, we're talking about the number of people that watch (listen to) a show. Sometimes we're talking about more than one show, so ratings is plural. But sometimes we use the plural form when talking about a single show ("The ratings for last year's Super Bowl were very high.") Unfortuantely, I don't have a good explanation for this. Maybe it's just convention. (By the way, "viewership" is another term that means "ratings.")

When we talk about movie ratings, we're talking about a very different concept. They are a classification scheme that describes a film's suitability for different types of viewers. (In this context, singular and plural works as you'd expect.) A movie can be rated G, PG, R, NC-17, and X. A G-rated movie is suitable for small children, while an X-rated picture is for adults only - and almost always pornographic. When discussing a movie rating, we could say, "This movie is rated R," or "This movie has an R-rating."

I'm not sure about "approval rating." That might be the more formal name for them, but it is almost always shortened to "rating."

The two different uses for "rating" does not usually cause confusion because of the context (Movies or TV/Radio).