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 […]

WORLD CUP ANNOUNCEMENT GETS HUGE COVERAGE — EXCEPT IN U.S.

Television cameras from all over the world crammed into FIFA headquarters in Zurich Thursday to carry live the official announcement that Russia would host the World Cup in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. In the U.S. only CNN carried the announcement live, although all networks mentioned it later in their newscasts — somewhat surprising given […]

WORLD CUP’S OVER; HOLLYWOOD TAKES OVER

A backlog of Hollywood blockbusters pushed back by the World Cup in many overseas locations is now clearing out. Although DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek Forever After was released in a limited number of countries in May, it opened strongly in several European countries over the weekend with $52.2 million in total overseas ticket sales, making it […]

SOCCER NOW BIGGER THAN HOCKEY, BASEBALL?

Any lingering doubts about Americans’ interest in soccer were dispelled Monday when Nielsen released figures indicated that Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands attracted 24.3 million viewers, who tuned in to the match on ABC and Univision. It was the most-watched soccer game ever on U.S. television and left other, more “traditional” […]

TOTAL WORLDWIDE AUDIENCE FOR WORLD CUP: 700 MILLION

If the ratings for the World Cup were huge in the U.S., they paled compared to those racked up in many overseas markets. FIFA, the organization that stages the contests, said that altogether 700 million viewers watched the final game in which Spain defeated the Netherlands 1-0, but the breakdown in some European countries was […]

“BIG BROTHER” MAKES TRIUMPHAN RETURN

CBS’s long-running summer-replacement series Big Brother returned Sunday night and showed that there’s still plenty of life in the reality show. Sunday’s debut episode at 8:00 p.m. attracted 6.97 million viewers, the same number who tuned in to the network’s 60 Minutes in the previous hour, but it topped the granddaddy newsmagazine in adults 18-49 […]

LATIN AMERICAN RATINGS SOAR FOR WORLD CUP

The strong showing by Latin American teams in the World Cup soccer matches is breaking ratings records not only in the homelands of those teams but also on the American Spanish-language network Univision, which attracted 9.3 million viewers for last week’s contest between Mexico and Argentina. Daily Variety reported today (Wednesday). In Brazil, the trade […]

WORLD CUP DRAWING ENORMOUS CROWD ON U.S. TV

If all of the viewers who have watched at least six minutes of the televised coverage of the World Cup thus far had tuned in at the same time, they would have produced an audience nearly as large as the record-breaking number who watched this year’s Super Bowl — one even larger than that of […]

UNIVISION RECORDS ITS HIGHEST RATINGS EVER

Sunday’s World Cup match between Mexico and Argentina, won by Argentina 3-1, attracted the biggest audience in the history of the Spanish-language network, Nielsen Research said on Monday. According to the ratings company, more than 9.3 million viewers tuned in, 60 percent of whom were between the ages of 18 and 49. In cities with […]

U.S.-GHANA WORLD CUP CLASH SETS NEW RECORD

The U.S. soccer team departed the 2010 World Cup in style Saturday. Losing to Ghana 2-1 in a dramatic match that ended in overtime, the American team attracted 14.9 million viewers on ABC and another 4.5 million on Spanish-language Univision, for a total of 19.4 million, making it the most-watched soccer telecast of all time […]

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