Three million views in a day for NOVA, and not from its new Chauvet film
The week's uploads, from a cystic fibrosis treatment before birth to a short asking whether dogs tell jokes, account for only a small slice of it.
NOVA PBS OfficialStory of Why this story? The whole channel is running at 2,993,146 views a day, 13 times a normal day (226,144).
For a channel whose ordinary day brings in a little over 200,000 views, a day of close to three million is a different kind of business, even for the long-running PBS science series.
The obvious suspect is the Chauvet Cave documentary. As we reported here, it started far ahead of NOVA's usual pace, and it has kept going: lions, mammoths and rhinos painted in a cave in southern France that a rockfall sealed some 20,000 years ago, with chapters on the giant bears that once prowled it and the large fires that lit it. But the film sits at around 200,000 views in total, a fraction of one day's traffic now. Its companion short, a horse from the walls billed as a 37,000-year-old masterpiece, is much smaller still.
The rest of the week does not close the gap either. "Does Notre Dame Still Sound the Same?", the What the Physics?! episode hosted by Athena Brensberger, is a re-post from January. "Can You Stop a Genetic Disease Before a Baby Is Born?" follows a mother named Stephanie and her baby, who has cystic fibrosis, through treatment that could begin in the womb. And a short from the NOVA podcast wonders what kind of jokes a dog would make.
Add them all up and they come nowhere near a single day of the channel's new pace, so the lift is coming from somewhere deeper in the archive, and it is not clear which film or clip set it off. Around NOVA, other documentary channels of a similar size are having ordinary days.
The archive in question goes back a long way. NOVA, made by GBH in Boston and still on PBS on Wednesday nights, signs its channel description "Blowing your mind since 1974."
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- Channel
- NOVA PBS Official
- Subscribers
- 1,530,000 ▲ 10,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 4,350,766
- Channel views, pace per day
- 2,993,146 (on a normal day: 226,144)
The numbers
The channel's whole day ran far beyond its usual pace, while its newest uploads moved at a much quieter rate.
💡 Test your knowledge
The Chauvet Cave lies near the Pont d'Arc, a natural stone arch over which French river?
The cave's full name is Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, after the natural arch spanning the Ardèche River in southern France.
