TSN’s Hockey Gold Beats CTV’s Super Bowl

The game was indeed super, especially if you were a Steelers fan. So how super were those Super Bowl numbers? Super in the States, sorta super in Canada.
According to BBM/NMR overnight estimates, 3,602,000 tuned in to the game on CTV. Our numbers guys measure the game as occurring between 6:31 and 10:08 p.m. last night, which seems about right.
The 3.6 million is not that much more than the 3.2 million who watched CSI on CTV last Thursday night, and less than the 3,692,000 Canadians who watched the Canadian men’s junior hockey team take the gold medal at the world hockey championships on TSN last month. Hockey on TSN beats Super Bowl on CTV? If there ever was any doubt, we are still a hockey nation.
TSN’s advantage is even more impressive when you consider that CTV’s Bowl number includes the simulcast of the big game on NBC border affiliates last night in Canada. Another 2,246,000 are estimated to have watched CTV’s simulcast of NBC’s pre-game coverage, and and 2,414,000 watched the 20-minute post game coverage, which ended rather abruptly and then switched right into CTV’s broadcast of The Mentalist.
That highly rated rookie, surprisingly, didn’t appear to get any kind of Super Bowl bump, with just 670,000 tuning in to The Mentalist at 10:28. Sneaky CTV was clearly trying to put the whammy on Global, which held the Canadian rights to NBC’s post-Super Bowl show, The Office–by jump starting The Mentalist 12 minutes before NBC’s post-game show ended. And while this might have dented the impact of The Office in Canada–which still found 532,000 Global viewers at 10:40–it also probably pissed off a lot of Canadian fans who weren’t quite done savoring the Steelers’ win.
In the States, NBC scored 89.15 million viewers between 7 p.m. and 9:30 in the overnight estimates. That number will likely soar over 90 million when the 6 p.m. hour is added and the final numbers come in. A year earlier, 97.45 million watched the Giants beat New England in last year’s Super Bowl thriller, carried by Fox.
Early estimated suggest over 29 million Americans stuck around for NBC’s The Office, but those numbers are pretty fuzzy, with a chunk of that audience more likely to be attributed to NBC’s post-game show by the time all the data is in.
Surprisingly, too, CTV did not flatten the opposition last night (as NBC did in the States), at least in total households. CBC still scored nearly a million viewers–961,000–with a Miss Marple movie opposite the Super Bowl last night, although most of that audience was older than John Madden. Global’s newsmagazine 16:9–which some people might have thought was the football score and switched back to CTV–shrunk to 257,000 viewers.