TSN scored a touchdown with Sunday’s Grey Cup coverage, with an overnight, estimated average audience of 5,478,000 viewers.
That’s a record for Cup coverage on TSN. The 2009 Grey Cup thriller swelled to over 5 million viewers on TSN, but that was back when the Portable People Meters were first introduced. Those “ratings ‘roids,” as I called the PPM’s then, were pulling over 4 million viewers a week for ordinary episodes of shows like House.
In 2010, TSN’s Cup numbers fell slightly to 4.94 million viewers, and last year, 4.38 million watched the game.
Sunday’s Grey Cup is not the most-watched ever in Canada, however. That 2009 game drew a combined 6.1 million on TSN and French language RDS. Sunday’s two network total topped out at 5.8 million.
The RDS total would have been boosted if Montreal–as usual–had been in the final, but the Argo victory helped goose the game tally in the Toronto area. CTV calculates that close to half the people in the greater Toronto area watched part of the Grey Cup Sunday.
Canadian pop sensations Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Jepson did jolt the demos. CTV says the total audience was up 44% over last year’s half time, averaging 6.1 million viewers.
Not everything opposite got tackled by the Grey Cup. The Amazing Race drew 2,055,000 on CTV. The Simpsons got 800,000 on Global.
