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Nine’s Olympics dominates across the weekend

Nine’s coverage of the Olympics dominated Australia’s weekend television viewing.

Friday’s main evening coverage of London 2012 rated an average metro audience of 1.427m according to ratings from OzTam, most watched show of the night. The early evening session rated 1.379m, second for Friday.

Saturday was even stronger for Nine, averaging 1.75m viewers for the evening session and 1.569m for the early evening.

Sunday night saw the main evening session averaging 1.667m, with the early evening session watched by 1.596m.

Meanwhile, Nine’s Olympic coverage dominated the entire ratings week. The network had every one of the top 16 shows from last Sunday through to Saturday night. Apart from two Nine News bulletins, all 16 were Olympics coverage.

Other than the opening ceremony, Nine’s  audiences have been broadly in line with or just slightly down on those of Seven’s 2004 Athens Olympics which was in a similar timezone. However, according to analysis prepared by one of Nine’s competitors, the audience has dropped by 13% in the ley advertising demographic of 16-39.

Meanwhile, Seven’s best rating programme on Sunday was Seven News with 1.346m viewers, fourth for the night, while Ten’s was Masterchef All Stars with an average of 787,000, seventh for the night. In 16-39, Masterchef All Stars rose to fourth.

Foxtel’s seven channels of live coverage have also been delivering strong audiences. According to the pay TV company, they averaged 673,000 on Friday night, 726,000 on Saturday and 716,000 on Sunday.

More follows later

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