Hockey Ratings a "Monster"

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Sunday night’s exciting game between the United States team and Canada was seen by 8.2 million viewers, a bigger audience than any NHL game on American television in 37 years. The game beat last year’s final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, which attracted what was then a 36-year high of 8 million on NBC.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...lympic-hockey/

Still waiting for Canadian numbers. A staggering 15 million is the estimate here:
http://olympics.thestar.com/2010/art...age-15-million

[gargamel]

That was just the preliminary game. I expect the gold medal game's ratings to be huge, although the 3pm Eastern start hurt it somewhat.

[Table 5]

8.2 Million seems really low to me (especially when you consider that some nothing show on ABC, Brothers and Sisters, had 7.9M). There was a lot of excitement for this game down here, and you usually never get that. Everyone I know was watching the thing...hell, I was in a bar packed with probably 200 people all there for the event.

I guess it just goes to show that even thoguh they were great numbers for hockey, in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that much.

edit: oops, just noticed gargamels post. That makes a big difference.

[mykalberta]

Oops, yah that was prelim game. Not gold medal game.

[gargamel]

The gold medal game was on NBC and got a 17.6 rating, which is somewhere around 20 million viewers.

http://sportsmediawatch.blogspot.com...edal-game.html

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

Oops, yah that was prelim game. Not gold medal game.

And the prelim was on MSNBC.

[Acey]

The article is dated February 22. Last night's game is expected to have over 20 million viewers. TV ratings for primetime come out at about 9:30 our time this morning, numbers for the rest of the day later still.

[sureLoss]

According to John Buccigross of ESPN:
http://www.twitter.com/Buccigross

NBC earned a 17.6 overnight Nielsen rating for Sunday's Canada-U.S. Gold Medal men's hockey game.

Sunday's game drew a higher overnight rating than every World Series game since 2004

AND every NBA Finals telecast since 1998, and every NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four game since at least '98. And every Saved by the bell

[mykalberta]

Wow.

Something tells me Betman wishes the Winter Olympics were in North America every year.

Also keep in mind that NBC is the 3rd or 4th rated network (non olympics) currently among the big 3+1 networks.

To put the numbers in perspective, Sunday's game drew a higher overnight rating than every World Series game since 2004 (including every game of Yankees/Phillies last year), every NBA Finals telecast since 1998, and every NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four game since at least '98.

Excluding the NFL, the 17.6 overnight for the game is the second-highest of the year for any sporting event, behind only the Texas/Alabama BCS National Championship Game in January (18.2).

[Acey]

Yup that's the household rating which is a pretty good estimate of how big it was. Official numbers from Nielsen later today.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Originally Posted by gargamel

That was just the preliminary game. I expect the gold medal game's ratings to be huge, although the 3pm Eastern start hurt it somewhat.

[wooohooo]

How do they measure this because a lot of people go to bars/pubs and have a lot of people over at their houses watching these games. Hell, half of Vancouver was outside watching the game on those big tv's.

[Acey]

Originally Posted by wooohooo

How do they measure this because a lot of people go to bars/pubs and have a lot of people over at their houses watching these games. Hell, half of Vancouver was outside watching the game on those big tv's.

None of that is accounted for. This is the US numbers were talking about anyway, where there would have been much less gathering of people. It's basically a sample of about 25,000 American TV households in various markets.

[getbak]

Did anyone watch the NBC broadcast? Did they do anything to promote the fact that they show NHL games every Sunday afternoon?

[tripin_billie]

Originally Posted by getbak

Did anyone watch the NBC broadcast? Did they do anything to promote the fact that they show NHL games every Sunday afternoon?

Lots of NHL ads. This and the Winter Classic are really starting to build momentum for hockey.

[corporatejay]

Originally Posted by Acey

None of that is accounted for. This is the US numbers were talking about anyway, where there would have been much less gathering of people. It's basically a sample of about 25,000 American TV households in various markets.

They do in Canada now, if you go in this thread

http://forum.calgarypuck.com/showthread.php?t=79357


Calgaryrocks talks about how now in Canada they have people wearing belts that receive signals or something. This is the reason there are so many records being broken this year, because they are accounting for bars etc...

[Acey]

Yes sir. Not as of yet for Nielsen, however.

[valo403]

Originally Posted by Acey

None of that is accounted for. This is the US numbers were talking about anyway, where there would have been much less gathering of people. It's basically a sample of about 25,000 American TV households in various markets.

I can't speak for the rest of the US, but in NYC (which, granted, is a place where people tend to watch sports at bars) the bars were jammed. I was at a place sponsored by the Canadian Society of New York that was at least 100 people over fire code. I literally could not take my hands out of my pockets at one point. All of the other bars on the block were packed with Canadian overflow, and American friends of mine were at a couple other places that were filled up. The game was a big deal down here, it's on the front page of every paper I've seen.

[tripin_billie]

Originally Posted by valo403

I can't speak for the rest of the US, but in NYC (which, granted, is a place where people tend to watch sports at bars) the bars were jammed. I was at a place sponsored by the Canadian Society of New York that was at least 100 people over fire code. I literally could not take my hands out of my pockets at one point. All of the other bars on the block were packed with Canadian overflow, and American friends of mine were at a couple other places that were filled up. The game was a big deal down here, it's on the front page of every paper I've seen.

I tried going to that bar for the game last Sunday and it was way too packed, so I went to the ESPN zone in Times Square, which was great because my wife and I got recliners and there was a pretty even split between Canadian and American fans.

Americans were definitely taking notice of hockey these Olympics.

[Netskot]

I can't believe just how far off those are from Superbowl numbers when this game was 10x more exciting.

Unreal.