How many people are watching Love Island Australia?
Thursday’s episode drew one of the season’s biggest audiences, and most of it was streaming.
Love Island Australia pulled a national average audience of 509,000 on Thursday 12 November, which Reality Recap reports is the show's second-biggest of the season so far.
Why should you care? Because if you watch on 9Now after work instead of on the couch at broadcast time, you are the reason that number looks the way it does. Here is how it breaks down.
So how big is 509,000?
Big enough to land in the night's top 10 by reach. These are the overnight OzTAM VOZ figures as published by Reality Recap, and B&T reports the same reach and average for both shows.
| Show | Reach | Average | BVOD |
| Love Island Australia | 1,079,000 | 509,000 | 389,000 |
| Big Brother Australia | 726,000 | 418,000 | 99,000 |
What is BVOD, and why does it keep coming up?
BVOD is broadcaster video on demand: the networks' own streaming apps, so 9Now for Love Island and Ten's own app for Big Brother. On the table above, roughly three in every four Love Island viewers came through streaming.
That is why TV Tonight's David Knox wrote that the show "continues to buck the trend thanks to BVOD". Most free-to-air shows still lean on the broadcast. This one is a streaming show that also happens to air on Nine.
Is it beating Big Brother?
On Thursday, yes, and by more than last week. Reality Recap reports Big Brother drew 418,000, almost unchanged from 420,000 a week earlier, while the gap between the two reality shows widened to 91,000. The Thursday before, only 28,000 separated them.
What don't we know yet?
These are overnight numbers, so the count of people catching up later in the week is still to come. Neither network's take on the figures appears in any of the three reports.
One steady Thursday does not make a trend. The next set of Thursday numbers will show whether the gap holds.
By Litty Newsroom
