By James Caldwell, PWTorch assistant editor

The first live summer edition of TNA Impact scored a 0.89 rating in a new timeslot one hour earlier, down 12 percent compared to last week's rating. Impact was down 17 percent compared to the yearly average.

-- Impact averaged 1.29 million viewers, a drop of 10 percent in viewership from last week and the lowest average viewing audience of the year. Impact was down 200,000 viewers (13 percent) compared to the yearly average.

It was the first time Impact viewership was below the 1.3 million mark since Thanksgiving 2010. For non-holidays, it was the first time in nearly two years dating back to July 1, 2010.

-- The positive for Impact is the demographic ratings did not drop off like the overall rating and average viewership. Impact was at the low-end of the yearly average before Thursday, and Thursday's show held up okay with slight drops in key male demographics and overall adults.

On cable TV Thursday night, Impact ranked #37 on cable TV, #14 among males 18-34, and #12 among males 18-49. The demo rankings were within the usual range. As for competition, the NBA Playoffs averaged an okay 7.1 million viewers for a conference finals match-up that turned into a blow-out.

-- We don't have the quarter-hour ratings yet to determine whether the first hour dragged down the overall performance.

-- Another perspective is the spring/summer ratings performance in 2010 after Impact attempted to run Monday nights. Starting May 13, 2010 when TNA returned to Thursday nights after changing their audience's viewing habits, the ratings were between a 0.87 and 0.99 for eight weeks before Impact returned to a "normal" rating of 1.14 on July 8, 2010. It remains to be seen if it takes TNA that long to "reset" the audience's viewing habits changing timeslots.

Caldwell's Analysis: Unless you count "going live" preventing an even worse performance, it doesn't appear the live factor affected the general audience. After all, those folks were already under the impression that Impact occurs in real-time because they don't know about/read spoilers. The other reminder is that wrestling viewers are very, very, very habitual in their viewing habits (especially considering the factor that it was the first week of summer break/last week of school for a lot of people).

TNA's best bet was a wash going live while changing timeslots, but the warning signs were there following seven consecutive weeks of poor first hour (now second hour) ratings leading into Thursday. The audience that typically tunes in for the start of the second hour at 10:00 p.m. EST to see if the rest of the show is worth watching suddenly found themselves watching UFC re-runs. So, it's going to a while for the casual audience to get the message on the timeslot change and adjust their viewing habits. This is if they aren't turned away by the insider talk, suspension-of-disbelief-killing segments outside of the wrestling narrative, and TNA's overall identity crisis.

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