Glenn Dyer's TV Ratings, Feb 07, 2017

The ABC’s Monday night News and Current Affairs programs returned in full force and added to the pressure on Ten by knocking it into 4th place. A strong night for MKR saw Seven (helped by the News and Bride and Prejudice) score a clear win in the metros over Nine and the ABC, followed by Ten, with those […]

The ABC’s Monday night News and Current Affairs programs returned in full force and added to the pressure on Ten by knocking it into 4th place. A strong night for MKR saw Seven (helped by the News and Bride and Prejudice) score a clear win in the metros over Nine and the ABC, followed by Ten, with those placings repeated in the regions.

In fact, MKR had its best night so far this year with the highest national audience of 1.95 million and 1.34 million for the metros. Married at First Sight saw its audience edge up to 1.31 million nationally, while I’m A Celebrity languished with a touch over a million national viewers (1.04 million). Bride and Prejudice on Seven at 9pm averaged 1.10 million, down from, 1.21 million a week ago, but it easily accounted for Nine’s House Husbands which couldn’t crack the million mark (956,000). Australian Story on the ABC also returned with underwhelming figures of 844,000 nationally – 559,000 metro and 285,000 regional. Well below normal, but give it a couple of weeks to hit its stride.

It may have been the first Super Bowl in history to have gone to overtime, but that didn’t produce a record TV audience across the US. Sunday’s game on Fox was watched by an average audience of 111.3 million people on its free to air network broadcast network, with an average streaming audience of 1.7 million and another 650,000 on Fox Deportes, Fox’s Spanish language cable sports channel.

That was down from 111.9 million viewers in 2016 on CBS and record of 114.4 million viewers on NBC in 2015. Fox pulled in close to $US500 million in ad revenues, including an extra $US20 million for the spots that ran in the overtime period. The cost was $US5 million per ad for the game proper, unchanged from 2016.

As is now normal the coverage included an interview with the President of the day – this time it was President Trump’s interview by Bill O’Reilly, one of his strongest media supporters. It was watched more than 12 million viewers on Fox, according to Nielsen ratings. For comparison: Obama’s first pre-Super Bowl chat, on NBC, netted 21.9 million viewers.

In Australia a total of 653,000 watched the game (506,000 on 7mate and 147,000on ESPN). 592,000 watched the half time entertainment.

Network channel share: