Canada Seeing Huge Jump In Viewership For Games; British Aud Peaks For Daley

Through the first three days, audiences for Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium’s coverage of the London Games are averaging 2.1 million viewers overall throughout its 22 hours of daily coverage and 2.8 million in primetime. The daily average is up 74% compared to the same period for the '08 Beijing Games. The Consortium’s tape-delayed primetime coverage on CTV is averaging 1.9 million viewers, 45% higher than CBC’s live/taped primetime coverage of the same period in ’08. For the start of the London Games to date, 28 million Canadians have watched some coverage on Consortium channels (Bell Media).

INTERNATIONAL RATINGS: The GUARDIAN's John Plunkett noted the biggest Olympics audience in Great Britain came Monday evening "with the peaktime Olympics programme featuring a host of swimming finals and semi-finals, attracting a five-minute peak of 8.8 million viewers." British diver Tom Daley "just missing out on an Olympic medal in the synchronised platform diving attracted a peak audience of 7 million on Monday, while more than 5 million tuned in to see the Team GB men's gymnastics team win bronze." BBC1's coverage of the diving "had a five-minute peak of 6.4 million viewers just before 4pm on Monday, with a further 600,000 on digital channel BBC Olympics 10." BBC1's afternoon Olympic programming between 1:45pm and 4:00pm local time "averaged 3.7 million viewers (36.9%), with an average of 4.8 million (35.6%) tuning in between 4pm and 6pm" (GUARDIAN, 7/31). Meanwhile, in Sydney, Michael Bodey reported the Nine network recorded a 40% share Monday as the London Games "continued to dominate viewing." Preliminary ratings showed the "early evening London Live telecast averaged 1.82 million viewers." Meanwhile, the later evening session, featuring the France-Australia women’s basketball game that went to OT, averaged 1.51 million viewers. Nine had a 36.4% "channel share (including the GEM simulcast in HD) and a 40.0 per cent network share against" Seven’s 17.2% channel share, ABC1’s 12.9% and Ten’s 11.6% (THE AUSTRALIAN, 7/31).