Fox Sports breaks pay TV record with rugby semi
Fox Sports had the highest audience in pay TV history on Sunday night with an average of 719,000 viewers tuned in to Fox Sports 3 for its coverage of the Australia-NZ Rugby World Cup semi final.
And although Nine Network averaged nearly 1.8m across all the overnight metro audience, it was a different story in pay TV only homes.
According to OzTam’s national subscription TV panel, in homes where viewers had the choice, 719,000 opted for Fox Sports’ coverage to 692,000 for Nine’s.
The previous record for subscription TV was 531,000 set by the Super Rugby Final on July 9.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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And thankfully at the two pubs I visited for the game, neither were showing C9 either so we missed out on adbreaks.
Do ratings ever take into account those watching in pubs etc? I’d think for an event like this the ratings would be very large, not to mention mostly on pay TV rather than terrestrial.
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thank god for Foxtel. The contempt C9 & any other free to air has for rugby fans is massive.
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And despite ratings like this, Foxtel refuses to set up a dedicated rugby channel, preferring instead to give the aerial ping pong (AFL) brigade their own channel. No wonder I pulled the plug on Foxtel two years ago.
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Actually, Hoin, they have given FoxSports 3 over to Rugby Onion for the entire world cup. Rather frustrating when live cricket was only shown via the red button on active, but replays of the Bledisloe were on FS3. You can please some of the people some of the time, and all that…
AFL fans are more deserving of their own channel as they tend to be so fanatical at the exclusion of other sports (and rather exclusionary to the casual viewer who would like AFL as their 5th sport) that it makes a lot more sense.
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It only did 584 according to the numbers i looked at (oztam)….. where is 719 from? are they channel stacking again??? thats not like foxtel…..
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not just contempt for rugby – they cut to ads during the nrl grandfinal and gave voiceover promos for underbelly while goalkickers were lining up to take penalties
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Yeh good point, but lets remember… no ad’s = no sport….
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Blue – the TV ratings only cover “in-home” TV viewing. While it is possible to use portable devices (or other estimation methods) to include “away-from-home” (i.e. public place) viewing, it would be enormously expensive to do – especially since there are only a handful of these large rating events each year.
Numbers – that data was for the subscription TV homes in the Metropolitan TV markets only. Subscription TV is a National service, and when you look at OzTAM’s NatSTV data, you will see that is was indeed 719,000.
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@John Grono Thanks. Not being a TV person, it’s something I often wonder about. Certainly in the UK they have special pub subscriptions to Sky (little pint glass in the corner of the screen). There would be good advertising opportunities to a captive and tightly knit demographic in pubs around the country. For example even using ads that work with the sound off/low. And then obviously in the breaks in big events. There’s always stuff showing in pubs up and down the place.
Sure there aren’t too many big rating events each year, but there you rarely see a game of any code on TV in a pub without at least 20 people watching it.
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which ever way you look at it – either Foxtel – my preferred viewing platform for Rugby, or C9 – which couldn’t even be bovva’d to show the opening ceremony live (for gawds sakes what’s that all about??!!)…. the Welsh were still robbed.
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