Who will take up the mantle of second-least-watched TV channel in the land?

Did you know NME TV vanished from the EPGs of our nation back in January? It's passing was low key, like a old soldier who'd lived a good life slipping away quietly in the night. I only realised it was gone when I was filling out an NME survey yesterday and realised that they weren't asking about the TV channel at all.

It's demise comes as no surprise - last year intensive research by Broken TV found it to be the second-least popular TV channel in the country.

So, with NME TV now apparently having made space for something called BuzMuzik, what station is replacing it in the nation's withheld affections?

Happily, Broken TV have produced an updated list of least-watched channels. (The methodology, in short, is to add together the audiences for top ten programmes on the 223 BARB counted channels for the last week of April, May and June, and then divide by 30 to get a figure for the average of the best-performing programmes on the channel.)

So, what do we discover? The bottom fifty is cluttered with music channels - Smash Hits puttering along with 12,500 viewers, for example; Kerrang just keeping ahead of Euronews down at 193; Scuzz and MTV Rocks fighting it out to be ignored by the largest number of metal fans with 9,700 and 9,470 viewers respectively.

But what at the very, very hard bottom of the list?

MyChannel is the least-bothered network in the land, with an audience of 4,170. But in the NME's old position of second-least watched channel is - of course - Q TV. 5,100 viewers, which does mean it welcomes 150 more bottoms - a whole 300 buttocks - onto sofas than NME TV was gathering in. But unfortunately, that's 250 fewer (viewers, not buttocks) than it was managing in 2010.

At the top end of the list, 4Music has dropped out the most watched fifty channels, but the R&B network Starz has taken its place as The Only Music Channel With An Actual Audience. (Also, that of all the UK TV portfolio, Yesterday's mix of Summer Wine and Nazi docs has made it the golden child.)

There's a lot more to enjoy in the tabulated data - go and have a look on Broken TV. Go on.

NME TV: The second least-popular channel in the country

There's a lovely table on Broken TV tabulating the popularity of UK TV channels. Based on the average figures for the ten most popular programmes broadcast in May 2011, most of the ratings for music channels are quite grim - only 4Music scrapes into the Top 50, with ratings of 98,425 viewers.

The once mighty MTV is at 52, behind NickJr 2.

At one point, The Box was going to change how we related to television and could at least call on drunk people watching overnight to shore it up; now, it's just the 110th most popular channel in the UK, with a figure a bit over 22,000. MTV Base is only 500 viewers ahead of BBC Parliament. But the further you fall down the list, the more once-famous music brands gather. Smash Hits? 15,000 viewers. Magic? 11,000. Q? 5,350.

But at the bottom of the bottom, with only WTF TV keeping it from getting mud on its ass, is NME TV. 4,950 viewers. And remember, that's the average of the ten best performances during May, implying there must be great acres of time when nobody at all is tuning in.

Adding salt to the wound, the great rival Kerrang is at least managing an average in the five figures. Just.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to look at on the internet - NME

Creative Review has got a piece on the making of the new adverts promoting NME TV.

If you've not seen them, they're based around 'throwing TVs out of windows':

They sum up the problem with the NME brand perfectly - lovingly created, wonderfully done, looks like a lot of time and money has been spent on them. But the idea of basing the campaign on 'throwing TVs out of windows'? It's a well-done cliche.

ALL the cover stars?

In a bid to tie closer together NME TV and NME, the magazine, the channel is promising a 'special' programme which features NME cover stars from the year.

We're a little at a loss to how this is special, by the way - surely a channel branded NME would naturally be playing the sort of acts that the magazine thinks its readership likes? - but we're more fascinated to discover if all the paper's cover stars will show up. National Front Disco on NME TV, anybody?

NME: Coming to your television

Oh, such exciting times of convergent media we live in. The NME is launching a TV channel, to be run by the Chart Show team. We're not sure, but we understand the idea is that it'll run the old Carry On Disarming video over and over again.

Or maybe not:

The NME publishing director, Paul Cheal, said the NME channel would be useful addition to NME.com and the weekly magazine, which has an average circulation of 68,511.

"Increasingly our mantra at NME is that our audience of 15- to 24-year-olds are incredibly promiscuous when it comes to media consumption so as a media owner you need to have an offering on every platform," Cheal said.

From a business point of view, that makes sense, but it's hardly a very compelling sell. "Watch this - we're expanding our offerings onto every platform". Mmm.

There's also, of course, a counterargument that, in a promiscuous age, spreading the brand ever thinner in such a clunky way waters it down still further to nobody's benefit. After all, Q TV hardly has any sense of identity at all and can't really do much to help flog the magazine, can it?

There's also a bigger question as to if there is any demands for NME on the telly - after all, The Amp and VH2 have both vanished, largely unmourned (except for round here) and we suspect that their proud guitar pop will probably be echoed on NME TV.

Getting into visual stuff makes sense for the NME - we're not convinced that means a 24 hour pop video station on traditional direct broadcast TV.