It's "must watch" TV, but nobody does

Some mistake, surely: that last posting was almost sympathetic to the Murdoch Empire. Time to redress the balance a little.

Murdoch's SKY-tv in the UK recently added a new channel: Sky Atlantic, "the new home of HBO drama". Most Sky channels are made available (for a fee) through other platforms, such as cable, but this one isn't, at least not yet.

The weeks leading up to the launch saw saturation advertising, accompanied by shameful amounts of free publicity in other Murdoch-owned media, including The Times. The big drawing card was deemed to be "Boardwalk Empire", the prohibition-era drama developed by Martin Scorsese and starring Steve Buscemi.

Well, after a few weeks the first ratings are in, and Boardwalk Empire, available to all ten million Sky subscribers in the UK, is getting audiences of .... about 280,000 per episode. By way of comparison, the almost unheralded, subtitled Danish detective series, The Killing, is drawing over 400,000 on BBC4*. A couple of years ago "The Wire", also much better than Boardwalk Empire, was watched by about 600,000 on BBC2.

As well as Boardwalk Empire, Sky Atlantic has snared "Treme", the new series by The Wire's creator David Simon, and it's poached the next series of Mad Men, for which the BBC has been diligently building up an audience for the last few years. It will be instructive to see whether the latter can maintain the audience it was getting at the BBC. For now, though, it seems certain that Murdoch is paying top dollar for these series and showing them at a big loss: it would have been quite possible to show them on one of the existing Sky channels (God knows there's plenty of dross there that could have made way), which would have allowed cable viewers and others to see them. Instead they're on a new channel that Sky subscribers don't have to pay for and nobody else can watch.

Why oh why would Murdoch do such a thing? Could it just possibly be that his aim isn't to build audiences for these shows at all, but simply to prevent the BBC from showing them? He's constantly complaining that the BBC, particularly through its website, is an unfair competitor with his own newspapers. It may be hard to imagine that the loveable old chap is using the HBO shows to exact revenge on the BBC, but that's the way it looks.

*Out of the goodness of his heart, Murdoch allowed us rubes a free look at the first couple of episodes of Boardwalk Empire, which qualifies me to opine that The Killing is immeasurably better. Even some of Rupert's own minions are starting to agree, with one Times columnist this weekend referring to "Boardsnore Empire".