Rose Major, on 31-08-2008
More Olympics stats, this time from sports enthusiasts Australia, where the Seven Network screened the Games on both its standard definition and high definition channels.


Although viewing to the HD channel was not measured, Seven said its standard definition channel alone saw the highest viewing of any Olympic Games, with 17.2 million Australians watching some of Seven’s coverage, “oupacing all other Olympic Games and other major events over the past five decades.”

Some 12.19 million from the five major metropolitan markets watched the Games, up from the 12.02 million who watched the 2000 Sydney Games and 12.15 million who watched the Athens Games.

Nearly 100 individual events, plus the top-ranking Opening Ceremony (2.824 metro viewers) had more than 2 million viewers, the kind of audience that only tunes in for the once-yearly major sporting events such as AFL (Australian Rules football) or NRL (rugby) grand finals.

Online, where Yahoo!7 had rights, but was criticised in some quarters for providing too little live coverage with just a few hours’ a day of live streamed material, just 4 million live and on-demand videos were streamed, a relatively small number in international terms. That backs up Yahoo!7’s argument that the reason it did not provide more online coverage was that the market for online video in Australia is still too small.

Seven will now give up its mantle of Olympic broadcaster, with the right to boast of that passing to Nine and Foxtel, which have rights to the 2012 London Olympics. That will increase television hours significantly, as Foxtel is allowed to multichannel, while free-to-air broadcasters are not. Seven said during the Games that had it been allowed to multichannel, it would have.

Source: Rapid TV News 2008

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