Weekend Ratings Wrap | Tennis dominates viewing as Big Bash season prepares for Finals
This article was originally on TV Blackbox. Updated with information from ESPNCricinfo.
It was another big weekend of sport with Kyrgios and Barty featuring at the Australian Open and Tennis dominating the weekend ratings. In addition, the final matches of the Big Bash home and away season were played out.
The Australian Open
Nine must be in raptures over the dominance of the Tennis at the moment. Saturday’s Australian Open coverage reaching 987,000 viewers in the metro markets, and dominating the day in general, while Friday’s coverage reached 800,000 viewers in the five cities, finishing just behind Sevens news bulletin. Sunday’s coverage was the top-ranked non-news programming of the day – and still had almost 600,000 metro viewers.
Big Bash League
At the conclusion of the home and away portion of the season, the league averaged 384,000 on Seven in the metro markets, while rating 163,000 on Foxtel nationally. These figures are down 15% on last year, but most of that probably eaten by the take up of Kayo subscription.
Average national ratings across both Seven and Fox during the regular season were 780,000, well down from 2018-19.
[According to OzTam figures obtained by ESPNcricinfo, the five city metro average audience for the BBL on free-to-air Seven has diminished from 424,000 last summer to 384,000 this season]
Fox Cricket’s audiences have also gone down somewhat, to an average of 158,000 viewers nationally this season, and to 169,000 for games simulcast with Seven. Afternoon games rated down to 115,000 per match.
The highest rating game on Seven was the season opener with a metro average of 531,000 across both innings.
The highest rating game for the season on Foxtel was the Stars v Renegades at the MCG which rated 257,000 nationally.
A-league and W-league
Saturday’s Mariners and Roar clash rated 39,000 on the ABC in metro free to air markets. It was also the highest rating Foxtel game with 20,000 viewers. Friday nights big game between Sydney and Victory rated 17,000 – less than the 17,814 in attendance at the game.
At the conclusion of round 16, the A-league averages 49,000 on the ABC in the five mainland capital cities, while the leagues average on Foxtel is around 28,000.
Sundays W-league clash between Victory and Canberra rated 22,000 in the ABCs metro markets. After 11 rounds of the 2019-20 W-league season, the average rating on the ABC is 29,000.
NBL
Saturday’s Adelaide and Brisbane clash was the top rating NBL game across the weekend and rated 15,000 on SBS Viceland in the capital cities. The top rating game on ESPN was Fridays Illawarra and Sydney match with 13,000 viewers nationally.
The NBL season average on SBS is 18,000 in the five mainland capitals – down 17% on the last couple of rounds on Nine. On ESPN the average is 19,000 nationally – but about half the data is unreported for the season.
Notes
As always, the TV Ratings data above is sourced from OzTAM preliminary overnight publicly released data, and as always does not include streaming services like nbl.tv, Kayo and Optus Sport, or Mobile services such as myfootballlive.
