Not even football was enough. Nor the European Athletics and Swimming Championships. Rai went through the summer with an important sports offering, although not exclusive, but Mediaset won the umbrella season. In the off-season television period, from May 31 to August 25, according to Auditel data processed by Studio Frasi, the Cologno Monzese group gathered an average of 2.8 million viewers throughout the day against 2.5 million for the public service. And the overtaking also came in the symbolically most important challenge: Canale 5 beat Rai 1 in prime time (3.5 million average viewers against 3.2) and in 24 hours (1.35 million against 1.28).
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Numbers. But behind them there is a difference in strategy. Mediaset decided not to send the core of its offer on vacation. It kept “The Wheel of Fortune” on Canale 5 on air, had “Temptation Island” as a ratings and social conversation machine, and found some TV series capable of intercepting the audience. Rai, on the other hand, relied mainly on the strength of sports events, leaving a lot of space to reruns. And it was not enough.
The choice left its mark. On the average summer day, the three Mediaset generalist channels totaled 2.1 million viewers against 1.7 million for the three Rai generalist channels. But above all, Cologno Monzese built an advantage outside the old live broadcast fence. Mediaset generalists gather 120,000 on-demand viewers, Rai’s just 37,000. This is where Francesco Siliato, media analyst at Studio Frasi, identifies the issue for Viale Mazzini: “From the overall research both on the eight months and on the off-season alone, it emerges the need for the public service to rethink its idea of a media company” and to design “a programming capable of developing an audience beyond live viewing.” The point, therefore, is not simply to better fill July and August. It is to manage to make a program live before, during, and especially after its broadcast on the small screen.
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The trend does not only concern summer. In the first eight months of the year, Mediaset produces every day 145,000 on-demand viewers against Rai’s 113,000. On-demand views represent 4.7% of the group’s audience against 3.8% for the public service. And the gap becomes even more evident when putting the two flagship channels side by side: Canale 5 gathers 88,000 average on-demand viewers, and Rai 1 stops at 52,000.
The Rai flagship can still claim the lead in the eight months: 1.534 million average viewers throughout the day against 1.514 for Canale 5. However, that advantage inevitably weighs on the Sanremo Festival, the television event par excellence, capable in February of giving the first public network a boost impossible to emulate for Mediaset and hardly repeatable during the rest of the year for public TV. So much so that, Siliato observes, “if the trend continues, Canale 5 could close 2026 ahead of Rai 1 in overall audience.” Even in prime time Rai 1 retains the lead from January to August 25, but the gap has progressively narrowed.
