Sherlock, Downton Abbey, EastEnders, Coronation Street, Mrs Brown’s Boys: as is traditional, Christmas and New Year 2015/16 saw the broadcast buffet groan with family-friendly fare. But who won – the BBC or ITV? And how long will the same battle be fought as new technology changes the game?

Downton Abbey wins Christmas – but New Year’s Sherlock goes one better

For the first time since 2000, ITV topped the Christmas Day ratings, with 6.9 million viewers for the last-ever episode of Downton Abbey. It was a sweet victory for the commercial channel, made all the sweeter when the consolidated ratings, which include catchup viewing over the following week, lifted Downton to 10.9 million viewers. As well as winning Christmas, that episode was the most-watched non-soap drama episode of 2015 – and, at close to 4 million viewers, set a record for the biggest-ever seven-day uplift in British TV.

But BBC1 scored an elementary win on New Year’s Day, with Sherlock’s 8.4 million overnight rating making it the most-watched original programme of the festive season. (Broadcasters discount the always huge audience for the fireworks at midnight at New Year’s Eve on BBC1, which this year scored an overnight audience of 12.5 million). Sherlock’s consolidated figures cemented its lead, giving the detective a seven-day total of 11.6 million.

BBC1 (almost) sweeps the board

Aside from Downton, Christmas was – as usual – a ratings triumph for BBC1. The channel scored eight out of the top 10 Christmas week programmes, with consolidated figures of 9.5 million for Mrs Brown’s Boys, 9.3 million for Call the Midwife and 9.28 million for children’s animation Stick Man. The BBC creates a supersized Christmas offering that other countries can only dream of. This year’s highest-rated show on Christmas Day in the US – scoring just 5.2 million viewers, with a population five times the size of the UK – was a colourised version of a 1960 CBS Andy Griffith Show Christmas special.

“We know that Christmas is so important to families … So we make sure there’s things like Brave to watch, as well as And Then There Were None,” says BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore. “I’m genuinely proud of the range that we offer to audiences.”

An honourable mention goes this year to Sky1 – which, on December 27, scored its highest overnight audience of the year with 742,000 viewers for Fungus the Bogeyman. And Channel 4’s Gogglebox children’s spinoff, Gogglesprogs, consolidated to 4 million viewers – helping the network to a year-on-year rise in overall Christmas Day viewing share of 34%. “We don’t think we’re competing at Christmas – we’re just trying to offer something for our viewers to watch, distinctive content that delivers for a young audience,” says Channel 4’s head of portfolio management Richard Brent. And, he adds, this is a public service offering rather than a commercial play: advertising revenue tends to dry up around December 20.

Why watch on Christmas Day when you can watch all week?

One notable decline over recent years has been the overall number of people watching live TV on Christmas Day itself. In 2010, Downton’s overnight rating of 6.9 million wouldn’t have even put it in the top 10 (which was topped by EastEnders, on 11.7 million). Total live viewing across all channels on Christmas Day 2015 averaged 13.5 million – down from 15.8 million five years ago.

But even if we are playing XBox on Christmas Day, we are catching up on its TV in ever greater numbers during the following week. The audience for all of 25 December’s peaktime schedules gained a total of 5.2 million viewers in the seven days that followed – up from 3.9 million in 2014, and keeping overall viewing steady year-on-year.

We still love the soaps. But why?

Apart from Her Majesty, the most enduring blockbusters of Christmas telly are the soaps, despite their grim death-and-divorce storylines. In the consolidated top 20 for Christmas week 2015, numbers 9 to 19 inclusive are all episodes of either EastEnders or Coronation Street. “EastEnders was appointment-to-view – over 8 million viewers on New Year’s Day,” says BBC1’s Moore. “You may say grim, but it has that great mix that EastEnders does – that rollercoaster of emotions, high drama and lovely comedic moments but some really tough stuff, too.”

Meet the ghost of Christmas TV future

Technology continues to change viewing habits, as TV and the internet gradually merge. In 2015, connected TVs generated 32% more traffic to BBC iPlayer over the festive fortnight than they had in 2014. Barb, the official TV ratings body, already issues a weekly report measuring traffic to on-demand services (such as iPlayer) from devices such as phones and tablets – figures which, in a few Christmases’ time, will likely merge with traditional ratings.

And traditional broadcasters face increasing, if embryonic, competition from new players. Netflix commissioned its first Christmas special, A Very Murray Christmas, this year – and Amazon debuted the second series of Mozart in the Jungle just before New Year.

But there will, says Broadcast magazine’s ratings columnist Stephen Price, still be packed Christmas Day schedules on BBC1 and ITV for years to come – even if the competition changes now Downton has ended. “They will both still want to be able to say, on Boxing Day, that they got the biggest show on Christmas Day,” says Price. “It’s totemic, especially for BBC1. It’s their day, their big thing. This coming year is the BBC’s best chance since 2011, when Downton turned up – and they’ll want that back, more than anything.”