New on Sports Media Watch, a one-stop page for all ratings news as it arrives.
Jon Lewis
It was no surprise that viewership declined for year one of the new NASCAR media rights deal, but the where, how and why could have implications for the six remaining years.
Jon Lewis
One of the most memorable postseasons in Major League Baseball history saw viewership rise in line with the drama.
Jon Lewis
The NFL entered the halfway point of its season with a blockbuster number for Chiefs-Bills.
Jon Lewis
The NBA maintained its strong Opening Week pace in week two of the season.
Jon Lewis
A World Series featuring a Canadian team and a pair of Japanese superstars delivered both in and outside of the United States.
Jon Lewis
ABC had a soft college football weekend by its lofty standards, but was it due to Disney-YouTube TV blackout or historically tough competition from the World Series?
Jon Lewis
Sunday’s Chiefs-Bills NFL national window averaged 30.84 million viewers on CBS, marking the second-largest audience of the NFL season, behind only the Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl rematch on FOX in Week 2.
Coverage featuring Colts-Steelers led-in with 18.56 million.
Source: CBS Sports
Jon Lewis
Featuring a Canadian team and airing on the least-watched night of the week, an all-time classic Game 7 of the World Series nonetheless drew a massive U.S. television audience.
Jon Lewis
The NFL scored a pair of multi-year primetime highs in Week 8 of the season.
Jon Lewis
If not quite as big a draw as Game 4 the prior night, Game 5 of the World Series delivered another audience in excess of 14 million on FOX.
Jon Lewis
The Blue Jays-Dodgers World Series is starting to pick up steam on U.S. television.
Jon Lewis
A World Series marathon held most of its audience into the wee hours of the morning.
Jon Lewis
The new NBA media rights deal paid early dividends in the Opening Week of the season.
Jon Lewis
If below last year’s best-case matchup of New York and Los Angeles, the World Series got off to a healthy start in the United States.
Jon Lewis
Games 1 and 2 of the Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series averaged 7.0 and 6.6 million viewers respectively on Canada’s Rogers SportsNet, marking the two most-watched Blue Jays games on record, according to the network’s reporter Hazel Mae.
American figures for Games 1 and 2 on FOX will not be available until Tuesday at the earliest.
Source: SportsNet PR
Jon Lewis
Thursday’s ESPN NBA doubleheader averaged 2.07 million viewers, up 53% from the opening Thursday of last season on TNT. That is a bigger year-over-year increase than ESPN had for its season-opening doubleheader the previous night (2.33M, +44%).
While Nielsen this year has expanded its out-of-home viewing sample and shifted to a new “Big Data + Panel” methodology, those changes would not fully explain an increase of that size.
The overtime Nuggets-Warriors game led the way with 2.23 million viewers, up 79% from Thunder-Nuggets on TNT last year (1.25M). The double-overtime Thunder-Pacers NBA Finals rematch led in with 1.98 million, up 37% from last year’s Spurs-Mavericks game (1.45M). (Thunder-Pacers had the bigger peak audience, 2.66 million.)
Neither game hit a multi-year high, as Suns-Lakers drew 2.30 million and Sixers-Bucks 2.04 million on TNT the comparable night in 2023.
Source: ESPN
Jon Lewis
For the first time since 1993, the Fall Classic is north of the border. What will that mean for viewership in the United States?
Jon Lewis
After a strong start on Opening Night, the second night of the NBA season delivered big gains of its own on ESPN.
Jon Lewis
ESPN/ABC hit a Week 7 high for the first half of what may be its final “Monday Night Football” doubleheader.
Jon Lewis
The NBA returned to NBC in a big way Tuesday night.
Jon Lewis
For the second time this postseason, nearly nine million U.S. viewers tuned in to watch the Mariners in a winner-take-all playoff game.
Jon Lewis
NBC and CBS can both claim to have delivered the largest NFL audience in Week 6 of the season.
Jon Lewis
Going from the maximum games last year to the minimum this year, the WNBA Finals was unsurprisingly less of a draw.
Jon Lewis
The Tigers and Mariners delivered a classic on the field and an outsized audience on television.
Jon Lewis
TNT Sports averaged 372,000 for its season-opening NHL doubleheader on Wednesday, specifically 516,000 for Bruins-Capitals and 240,000 for Kings-Golden Knights — up 10% and down 24% respectively from last year. The Kings game overlapped with the competing Dodgers game on TBS (3.7M).
Source: TNT Sports
Leave a Reply