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Half a million Aussies stayed up all night for cricket and tennis thrillers, TV ratings reveal

More than half a million Australians stayed up virtually all night on Sunday to watch two of the most thrilling moments in recent sporting history unfold in London.

OzTam’s overnight ratings, which became available this morning, showed a collective 276,000 regional and metro viewers tuned in to Seven for the Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. The five set thriller, which went to a 12-all tie in the final set before Djokovic won the tie breaker, ran for nearly five hours, the longest Wimbledon singles final in history. The match ran until after 4am on Monday morning, Australian east coast time.

Meanwhile, England’s epic Cricket World Cup final battle with New Zealand – which went to a tie breaking “super over” and then a boundary countback after both teams scored 241 in 50 overs – also went on well after 4am.

An average of 199,000 watched the final stages of the cricket on Nine, while a further 54,000 tuned in on subscription channel Fox Cricket.

Adding to the Monday morning bleary eyes across Australia, a total of 95,000 Fox Sports viewers watched Sunday night’s Formula One race from Silverstone in UK which started just after midnight Australian Eastern time

 

Meanwhile, in more reasonable hours of Monday, Seven News was the most-watched program on Monday night, pulling 1.159m metro viewers for the first half at 6pm and 1.075m for the latter which airs as Today Tonight in some cities.

The most-watched entertainment programming was Nine’s Australian Ninja Warrior with 923,000 viewers, a drop from the premiere of 1.01m a week ago, but up from 899,000 on Sunday night. It was also the most-watched in two of the three key advertising demographics, topping both the 18-49s and the 25-54s. This was reflected in the overall metro audience share, with 22.5% of metro audiences in the 25-54 bracket watching Nine.

A return to form for Ten’s Have You Been Paying Attention saw it bring in 703,000 metro viewers after it dropped to 598,000 last week without regular panellists Sam Pang and Ed Kavalee. Last night it was led by guest host Chrissie Swan, who co-hosts a breakfast radio show alongside Pang for Nova 100 in Melbourne, but the loss of regular host Tom Gleisner didn’t seem to affect the numbers, with the show still managing to top the youngest key advertising demographic of 16-39s. The channel also took the top spot overall with metro audiences 16-39, holding a 22.2% audience share.

Seven’s most-watched entertainment program was Home and Away with 711,000, while House Rules dropped back significantly to 590,000 from 732,000 on Sunday night.

ABC News was the most-watched for the broadcaster, bringing in 716,000 metro viewers, followed by Back Roads on 681,000.

It was a tight race in overall audience share across the channels but Nine took the win, holding 21.3% over Seven’s 18.9%, Ten’s 14.0% and ABC’s 13.2%. Things got even closer at a network level, but Nine held on to the win with a 27.7% share over Seven’s 27.3%, Ten’s 19.5% and ABC’s 17.5%. The most-watched secondary channel was Ten Bold with 3.7%.

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