Tuesday night saw three free-to-air networks go head to head once again in the battle for reality TV viewers.
Seven’s renovation show House Rules debuted its third season on Seven and its two proprietary channels, 7Mate and 7Two last night at 7.30pm. As did Nine’s Reno Rumble (on Nine and GO) and Ten’s reality cooking show MasterChef (on Ten only).
According to OzTam preliminary ratings, MasterChef took out the night with 1.231 million viewers, topping the charts above news programs and the other reality shows.
Nine’s Reno Rumble grabbed eighth position out of the top most viewed shows last night with 873,000 viewers in a five-city metro and Seven’s House Rules came in eleventh with 791,000 viewers.
The launch of the seventh season of MasterChef also gave Ten the highest share of viewers for the night, with 27.4 per cent, just scraping past Nine who nabbed 26.5 per cent and Seven at 22.1 per cent. In terms of the other networks, ABC came fourth in overall audience share with 17.7 per cent and SBS fifth with 6.3 per cent.
Despite coming second in the reality TV contest, Nine is confident Reno Rumble will perform well.
“We’re really happy with such a solid start for Reno Rumble and know that viewers will continue to flock to the program, particularly with our very first room reveals tonight,” a Nine spokesperson told B&T.
“As a launch for a new franchise in such tough competition of established programs we feel very confident the show will continue to perform well. We have a very strong schedule coming up.”
Unsurprisingly, Ten is beside itself with the launch results of its seventh season.
“We are thrilled with such a positive start to MasterChef Australia,” said Network Ten’s chief programming officer, Beverley McGarvey. “It is great to see Australia embrace the wonderful talent on this year’s show. MasterChef is a massive team effort from a huge amount of people at Network Ten and Shine. Special thanks to our wonderful judges, George, Gary and Matt. This is only the very beginning: there is a brilliant, exciting, mouth-watering series ahead.”
