2 min read
Philippine free TV has, for years, leaned heavily on simulcasting — airing the exact same program at the exact same time across two, three, or more channels owned by the same network. It's a practical way to maximize reach across the different footprints and licenses each channel holds. But it creates a real headache for anyone trying to read ratings numbers literally: when a source reports "Program X got a 25.3%," that figure sometimes covers every simulcasting channel added together, and sometimes it's just one of them. Reported the same way, in the same sentence, with no distinction — unless you know to ask.
Ratings providers don't always break out a per-channel figure for a simulcast, either because their measurement methodology tracks the program as a single broadcast event across its channels, or because the source reporting the number (a network press release, a social media post) only ever published the combined total. That combined total is a genuinely useful number — it tells you how big the whole simulcast's reach was — but it answers a different question than "how did this one channel perform."
Imagine two dramas: one simulcasts across four channels and posts a combined 10.7%, the other airs on a single channel and posts 8.7% on its own. Read naively, the first show looks like the clear winner. But the second show is doing that entire number by itself, on one channel, while the first show's figure is split across four — its per-channel average is nowhere near 10.7%. Comparing the two head-to-head as if they were on equal footing would be misleading in either direction, depending on what you're actually trying to measure: total simulcast reach, or per-channel performance.
Every rating entry here is tagged to every channel it actually covers. A figure tagged to exactly one channel counts toward that channel's own average and toward the individual network rankings. A figure tagged to several channels at once is treated as a combined simulcast total — it still shows up in a program's own history (since it's a real, reported number for that program), but it's deliberately excluded from any single channel's own performance figures, so one network doesn't get credited four times for the same broadcast. The goal is to preserve exactly what was actually measured, without silently guessing at a per-channel split that was never reported in the first place.
If you want to compare programs fairly, use the Rankings page's Networks view for channel-vs-channel questions (it only counts each channel's own solo-tagged figures), and treat a program's own combined total as answering "how big was this broadcast's total reach," not "how good is this one channel." They're both legitimate questions — they're just not the same question.
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