Love Island given 1m more viewers as TV ratings include all devices

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Love Island's ratings have been given a belated boost after research showed a million people watched each episode on PCs and mobile devices but weren't counted in official viewing figures.

The research was published as Barb, the ratings body, announced it has started counting people who watch on devices.

From now on, ratings for phones, PCs and tablets will be used alongside the existing method for viewing on TV sets.

That would have pushed Love Island's daily audience to almost five million.

Using the previous method, the average consolidated ratings for the ITV2 reality show were around 3.9 million per day.

That just counts people who watched on TV sets, however - either live or on delay.

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In fact, according to Barb, around 380,000 more watched on PCs and laptops within seven days of broadcast; 369,000 watched on phones; and another 240,000 watched on tablets.

While Love Island's ratings saw an increase of around 25% when such devices were taken into account, the figure for other shows is lower.

EastEnders, Unforgotten and Our Girl saw "device uplifts" of 4%, while Poldark had an extra 3%, Barb said.

Sport is usually even lower - England's World Cup semi-final against Croatia had an uplift of just 1.6% because so many people were watching live on TV.

In future, the new data will be published eight days after the programme's first broadcast.

These figures are separate from overnight ratings, which come out the morning after a TV broadcast and predominantly count people watching live on TV sets.

And the new figures won't track people watching services like Netflix, YouTube or Amazon Prime rather than network channels.

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