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Rugby semi final and The Ashes dominate Friday’s television viewing

Cricket and rugby dominated Friday night’s viewing, with strong audiences tuning in for the Rugby League World Cup semi final on Seven and for The Ashes on Nine.

Seven won the boasting rights, with preliminary overnight ratings showing a national audience of 1.077m tuning in to watch Australia trounce Fiji.

Meanwhile the third session of the first Ashes test averaged national audience of 956,000 for Nine. Nine said that, corrected for the actual broadcast times, this number rose to 1.035m.

Among audiences in the five capital cities only, the preliminary numbers showed a dead heat, with both the third session of the cricket and the rugby averaging 671,000 metro viewers. Nine said that correcting for the broadcast times, its metro audience rose to 730,000.

Nine said that the third sessions audience peaked at 1.3m viewers. It said the average national audience for the first session was 594,000 and for the second session was 788,000.

Seven comfortably won the ratings battle on Friday, with a peaktime metro share of 22.7%, ahead of Nine’s 17.7%.

ABC averaged 12.6%, with its top program ABC News rating 592,000. Ten was fourth with a 10.1% share and The Living Room rating 400,000 metro viewers.

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