TV executives are on top of the world right now, thrilled that you spent at least part of the last few weeks tuning into major sporting and political events. Records were shattered last month when more than two out of three people worldwide watched the Beijing Olympics on TV.
According to new numbers just released by Nielsen Media Research, 4.7 billion viewers worldwide tuned into at least some of the 17 days of Olympic TV coverage last month. The audience was one-fifth larger than the 3.9 billion who watched the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, according to the folks at Nielsen.
Even more staggering is the revelation that host nation China logged an audience reach of 94% among its population of 1.3 billion. While the U.S. can’t compete with China’s numbers, Nielsen’s stats show that in this country where NBC and its sister networks aired extensive coverage, the 2008 Olympics set a new record as the most-viewed event in American television history.
Network execs say they were expecting big numbers for the Olympic Games, but they say they could have never predicted the incredible response they saw in terms of viewers for the recent political conventions.
According to Nielsen Media Research, 38.9 million people watched John McCain accept the Republican presidential nomination on six commercial networks Thursday night. (PBS estimates its audience for McCain was 3.5 million.) In comparison, last week Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s speech in Denver was seen by 38.4 million people on commercial networks and 4 million people on PBS.
If you add those numbers together the candidates each had an estimated audience of 42.4 million viewers. Nielsen noted that an estimated 37.2 million people watched Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speech on Wednesday with nearly 2 million more women watching Alaska’s governor than men. Going strictly on Nielsen’s numbers, viewers were far more interested in Palin than Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden. Biden’s speech to Democrats last week was seen by an estimated 24 million people.
How many of you tuned into the monster events?