Will later Outlander season 4 premiere date help or hurt the ratings?

By now, there is a reasonably good chance that you know the news about the Outlander season 4 premiere date: You are not going to be seeing it on Starz for a rather long time. The show is coming back in November and while the specific airing structure is not entirely clear, we’ve got a pretty good feeling that you’ll see at least a reasonable batch of episodes before the series heads off on hiatus … if it chooses to go on one for the holidays.

For the sake of this particular article, the question that we want to pose is really quite simple: Will this later premiere date actually help or hurt the show’s ratings? There are, ultimately, two different ways to look at this.

Why it will help the ratings – The basic answer that we can give is that a November start time is going to mean, in turn, that it will give more viewers a chance to catch up. We do think that this can be helpful, at least so long as you are giving viewers along the way some reason to engage with the show and remember that it is on. It also helps you avoid the start of the NFL season, not that we think that this is all that much of a threat to a series like this.

Why it could hurt – With a later premiere date, one of the things that you do have to worry about is that there will be some viewers who fall off after such a long wait — or, that there is a smaller overall pool of live viewers around when you get to the holidays. Remember that with Outlander, the live viewers don’t really matter so much — it’s more about subscribers for Starz. You do want to do everything that you can in order to ensure that some of these viewers stay engaged and keep subscribing — almost like they need to watch the show every week. That gives Starz more subscription revenue as opposed to someone just buying at the end and binge-watching.

Our Take – In the end, we think that the later start date should help out Outlander slightly, but whether or not the hiatus makes a discernible difference remains to be seen. If the ratings go up slightly, after all, it could be easy to claim that this is just because of viewers discovering the series as they would have if the premiere was earlier in the year.

Related – Check out some of our recent character spotlights for this season

What do you think: Will Outlander season 4 premiering later this year help or hurt the ratings? share right now in the comments!

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