March 2014

Kensaku Saito / Wataru Nihei / Satoshi Sekiguchi / Keiko Mitsuya

In order to examine how people watched and perceived Amachan, an NHK morning drama serial, the authors conducted four types of survey. The findings from each survey include the following. (1) Audience ratings analyses: Amachan’s household audience rating is not much different from that of other morning drama serials broadcast in recent years. (2) Public opinion survey: the recognition rate of Amachan is very high (92%), which suggests how huge the buzz over the drama was. Those who have watched Amachan, at least one episode, are 49%, many of whom say that they watched Amachan as they “routinely watch NHK morning dramas,” which confirms that viewing habit is influential. The viewer satisfaction rate is 73%. Meanwhile those who posted comments on SNS or other Internet websites and those who viewed these sites account only for 1%, respectively. (3) Internet questionnaire survey for those who watched Amachan relatively frequently: of all surveyed 54% have watched recorded episodes, and 42% have watched “one episode many times,” which shows that some people watched the program with enthusiasm by employing various methods. (4) Social media monitoring, which was conducted to study viewers’ actual comments on Twitter: the number of tweets on Amachan increased day by day, to 6.5 million tweets in total, which is 12 times as many as those on the previous series Umechan Sensei. Besides, 40% of the total tweets on Amachan were posted by 1% of the Twitter accounts that had made any comments on the program, which tells that some fans with a great “passion” for the program were leading the whole tweets on Amachan. Comments included both ‘immediate responses’ to “trivia” that viewers posted while watching the program and ‘telling of their own stories’ after each episode as viewers empathized with the drama, which highlights that the drama had both “amusing” side and “empathy-evoking/moving” side.

The NHK Monthly Report on Broadcast Research