Even while the AKB Election was broadcasting live, news stories about Fuji TV’s crappy broadcasting was already trending on Yahoo News. Amidst a sea of commercial the broadcast being cut off by commercials, Fuji TV’s response so far has been: “Ratings were hire than last year.”

Fuji TV received a lot of fan rage, not only for the incessant inclusion of commercials, but the sheer fact that commercials would cut off in the middle of member speeches. Not only that, but frequent interruptions from Fuji TV commentators also cut into audio whilst member speeches were broadcast. As a seeming, “apology” of sorts, Fuji TV mentions that ratings were much higher than last year.

Fuji TV reports that ratings were about 18.8%, which is up from 16.2% from last year. This is possibly Fuji TV’s way of saying, “If the broadcast was so bad, why were ratings so high?!”

In some ways, this really seems obvious. The BS Sky Premium stopped broadcasting at around 7:30pm local time. For viewers watching the broadcast on TV, they had no choice but to switch to Fuji TV. But the silliness doesn’t end there!

However, staff at Business Journal say that the ratings numbers were a result of some manipulation. As they put it, “This is a magic number!” The staff member goes on to explain how Fuji TV calculates ratings. Rather than taking an average of viewers over the entire broadcast (which was shown from 6:30pm to about 10pm local time), the view percentages are adding from 30 minute time slots.

For example, suppose ratings are 7.5% from 6:30pm to 7pm, and then 10.3% from 7pm to 8pm. The average viewership would be 8.9% over the entire time period. However, it seems that TV stations will add percentages together instead of averaging. In this case, the result would be 17.8%. Much higher number, much nicer. Just more deceptive, and statistically meaningless.

Here’s hoping that next year’s AKB Election broadcast won’t be as rife with fan rage.

Source: http://biz-journal.jp/2015/06/post_10300.html