The Winners: My Kitchen Rules won the night with 1.471 million people. Seven News was second with 1.383 million and the fresh 7.30pm episode of Two and a Half Men on Nine averaged 1.326 million. 4th was Today Tonight with 1.274 million, Nine’s 8.30pm program, The Mentalist, averaged 1.228 million and Nine News was 5th with 1.217 million. Desperate Housewives averaged 1.086 million and Home and Away won the 7pm slot with 1.086 million for Seven and just in front of the repeat of Two and a Half Men on Nine with 1.080 million. 10th was A Current Affair with 1.072 million, and 11th was Big Bang Theory on Nine at 8pm. Australian Story averaged 872,000 at 8pm for the ABC.

The Losers: The viewers of Q&A. Don’t know about you, but I was left underwhelmed by it all, it was so predictable. 456,000 people watched. Not good, not bad.

News & CA: Seven News again won nationally and in every market but Sydney where Nine was a solid winner. Seven won Melbourne and elsewhere. ACA beat TT in Sydney, but lost in Melbourne and elsewhere. The 7pm ABC News averaged 964,000 people. The 7.30 Report, 743,000. Four Corners, 645,000, Media Watch, 554,000. Lateline, 230,000, Lateline Business, 108,000. Ten News averaged 896,000, the late News/Sports Tonight, 181,000. SBS News at 6.30pm, 175,000, 130,000 for the late edition. 7am Today, 390,000 and 7am Sunrise, 332,000.

The Stats:

FTA: Seven won All People 6pm to midnight with a combined overnight share of 32.0% to 29.0% for Nine. Ten was third with 17.2%, the ABC was on 15.5% and SBS, 6.3%. Seven won Sydney Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth and Melbourne. Seven now leads the week 30.5% to 29.8% for Nine. In Sydney and Brisbane, Nine’s main channel won.

Digitally: 7TWO won with 4.1%, GO was next with 2.4% for Nine, ABC 2 was on 1.5%, Ten’s One, 0.5% and ABC 3 and SBS TWO, 0.4% each. 9.39% in total. GO leads the week for 3.6% to 7TWO with 3.0%.

Main Channel: Seven on 27.9%, Nine, 26.6%, Ten, 17.2%, the ABC, 13.6% and SBS, 5.9%. Seven leads the week 27.5% to 26.3%.

Pay TV included: Seven won with 26.6% combined overnight share, from Nine with 23.9%, Pay TV with 15.6%, Ten, 14.1%, the ABC, 12.8% and SBS, 5.1%. The 11 FTA channels had 84.4%, the 100 plus Pay TV channels had a combined 15.6%.

Regionally: A big win to Nine through WIN/NBN with a combined overnight share of 30.5%, from Prime/7Qld with 26.3%, the ABC with 17.7%, Southern Cross (Ten) with 17.5% and SBS with 8.0%.

Glenn Dyer’s comments: Seven won last night from Nine. Nine was competitive because of a reasonably strong performance by GO. Nine and Seven drew All People last Monday night and in the first week of this month, Nine had a clear win on Monday night with much the same line up as last night. Only the Winter Games coverage has been added.

We are now four days into the 2010 winter Olympics. For Nine and Foxtel, the results are flat to horrid. TV industry talk has the duo paying $US126 million for the rights to these events and the 2012 summer games; if that’s the case, it’s not good to be a gold mine, far short of it. The split is 50% Nine, 50% Foxtel. The London games will get more viewers and interest, especially from Pay TV subscribers because digital penetration will be higher. But both networks have the coverage costs to worry about. They will add tens of millions of dollars to the final bill.

These Winter Games will probably be loss-making for both after the coverage costs are expensed against income. So far audiences are averaging across the day just over 586,000 for Nine. That compares with 758,000 for Turin on Seven in 2006 and more than 985,000 for the Salt Lake City Games in 2002, also on Seven. The Salt Lake City games are in the approximate time zone that Vancouver is (that is, not good for Australian prime time). Some of Turin’s events (mostly heats) were in prime time. Foxtel is not breaking out the audience figures for its four special HD games channels.

A year ago Nine was showing us Underbelly 2 and getting good ratings, this year audiences for the network are down sharply because of that. They will jump after the Games when Underbelly 3 is shown, but Nine’s ratings momentum will have had a slow start to 2010. They can’t blame the games for the slow start, because it was their decision to bid for it and program it the way they did, knowing the time zone would work against them. So far there hasn’t been one audience figure above a million viewers. Seven had three or four in the first four days of both the 2002 and 2004 games.

TONIGHT: Top Gear on Nine, one new, one repeat. The third part of The Grand Tour, Kevin McCloud’s fine series and Foreign Correspondent, both on the ABC. My Kitchen Rules on Seven, NCIS on Ten. And Bondi Rescue.

Source: OzTAM, TV Networks reports