CTV released figures Monday declaring that eleventy trillion zillion Canadians and future Canadians and their pets/unborn babies watched, read, listened to or channeled all or part of almost all or none or every commercial minute of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
The CTV-Rogers broadcast consortium had BBM Canada come up with handy new CUME totals (Can U Makeit Enormouser) in order to count every Canadian eyeball, with glasses wearers counting as four. The result–across the many CTV-Rogers, etc. platforms–was that the Olympic broadcasts claimed the Top 5 spots in the history of Canadian television*.
Among the actual facts and figures in Monday’s CTV release: Canadians consumed 1.25 billion hours of Vancouver 2010 Olympic coverage. About 22 million of us tuned in just in time to see Sidney Crosby score the overtime winner in the Canada-USA hockey tilt. TSN tripled its full-day audience to become the 2nd most-watched network in Canada during the Games, with Rogers Sportsnet right behind at #3.
An average audience of 10.3 million viewers watched the Men’s Hockey gold medal game on CTV alone, with and additional 2.78 million watching on TSN and 2.52 million watching on V/CPAC and RDS.
According to BBM (Big Beaver Measurement), the GILSE (giant, inflated lazy stereotype extravaganza) closing ceremonies now stands as the second most-watched television broadcast in Canadian history with an average audience of 14.3 million viewers. That is more than double that of Salt Lake City in 2002 (6 million).
In the States, an average of 20.52 million viewers turned to NBC for the beaver closing ceremonies, although about five million bailed as things started to get giddy. NBC pissed off another 14.48 million who were forced to watch Jerry Seinfeld’s The Marriage Ref in a breathtaking Olympic bailout at 10:30 p.m.
Surprisingly, CBS’ new reality show Undercover Boss weathered the Olympics nicely with 15.07 million viewers.
Sunday afternoon’s gold medal hockey game between Canada and the USA drew an estimated 17.6 overnight rating on NBC, making it the most-watched hockey broadcast in the U.S. since 1980’s Miracle on Ice. The game pulled a higher rating Stateside than every World Series since 2004 and every Men’s NCAA Basketball Final game since 1998. Excluding the NFL, the overnight rating is the second-highest audience for any sporting event in the U.S. this year, behind only the Texas/Alabama BCS National Championship Game in January.
Incredibly, more people saw the gold medal hockey game in the U.S. than in Canada. Does Gary Bettman still want to pull NHLers out of the next Winter Olympics?
*except more people still saw Paul Henderson score in ’72, but that was measured the old fashioned way with people actually writing down that they watched so apparently it doesn’t count.
