82.5% OF BRITISH VIEWERS TUNE IN OLYMPICS’ OPENER

An average audience of 27 million watched Friday night’s BBC telecast of the Olympics’ opening ceremony, peaking at 9:50 p.m. with 26.9 million, the BBC said today (Saturday). The figures represented 82.5 percent of British viewers and was the biggest audience for a BBC program since 1996, when a Christmas episode of the British sitcom […]

FANS CHEER HOBBIT PREVIEW AT COMIC-CON

Reports coming out of Comic-Con about the screening of 12 minutes of scenes from director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings prequel(s), The Hobbit, had as much to do with fan reaction as with the preview itself. The Associated Press’s David Germain wrote, “If reaction to The Hobbit footage at Comic-Con is any indication, Peter […]

AUDIENCE SPLITS WITH JUDGES ON IDOL FINALISTS

Perhaps the reason why ratings for American Idol have been declining is that the judges and the audience are not on the same track. That judgment seemed to emerge from Thursday night’s vote when the audience eliminated Joshua Ledet, whom judge Randy Jackson had once called one of the “top two Idols of all time.” […]

SUPER BOWL SUPER ONLINE, TOO

It seems like a tailgate party by comparison, but the 2,105,441 “unique users” who accessed NBCSports’ live stream of the Super Bowl represented the biggest online audience for a sports event ever, according to data released Tuesday by Omniture and mDialog. That number may have amounted to only 1.89 percent of the total U.S. audience […]

MOONVES: EVEN BAD FOOTBALL GAMES GET GOOD RATINGS

Television executives love football fans. Unlike TV shows that require dozens of producers, writers, focus groups, and public relations personnel to become successful, football requires none of that. “The NFL is an unbelievable property,” CBS chief Les Moonves told a media conference in New York on Tuesday. “You see it in the ratings: Even a […]

SUPER BOWL AUDIENCE MAY EXCEED 2010’S

Last year’s Super Bowl game was the most-watched television program in U.S. history; this year’s may even be bigger. In a poll conducted for the Hollywood Reporter by Penn Shoen Berland, 78 percent of respondents said that they plan to watch Sunday’s telecast, an increase of 6 percent from 2010 and 10 percent from 2009. […]

CONAN’S AUDIENCE DROPS — A BAD SIGN?

As expected, the audience for Conan O’Brien’s new talk show on TBS dropped by nearly a third on its second night, falling to 2.8 million viewers from 4.2 million on Monday. But news reports gave the decline contrasting interpretations. Several reports cited negative criticism of the first show by some TV critics and suggested that […]