It’s the summer off-ratings season and doesn’t it smell like it already. The much anticipated return of It’s a Knockout didn’t disappoint, coming in 2nd overall and the highest rated non-News program for the night. A highlights package of 60 Minutes was good, but not good enough to win the 7:30pm timeslot. The move into repeats for a lot of programming (especially Ch7 staples Bones and Castle) did them no favours as all numbers were significantly down on previous weeks. Even Ch10’s first run Terra Nova could only manage second for the 8:30pm timeslot to CSI, but numbers for both were not great.

The ARIA Awards 2011 was the highest rating digital multi-channel show (369,000) and 19th overall for the evening. It was a massive step up on last year, and offered a bigger social interaction platform in lots of tweets and the hilarious Access All ARIAs mobile-only content delivered by Jabba.

Timeslot winners (nationally):
6:00pm: Seven News – Ch7
6:30pm: Mighty Ships – Ch7
7:30pm: It’s A Knockout – Ch10
8:30pm: CSI – Ch9
9:30pm: Castle – Ch7

Channel 7 won the night (17.7%), followed by Channel 9 (16.4%), Channel 10 (15%) & ABC1 (13.6%).