Eurodata TV revealed that the World Cup final attracted 163 million viewers in 20 territories, according to Robert Briel of BROADBAND TV NEWS. Eurodata TV Worldwide Sports Dir Yassine Berhoun said, "This clearly shows once again that even at the age of mobile devices and non-linear viewing, major sports events are the only shows capable of gathering such large audiences in front of a TV set." In France, 19.3 million viewers witnessed the country's victory over Croatia on TF1 in the middle of the afternoon. In Croatia, the semifinal against England gathered nearly 1.5 million viewers on public channel HTV2 (81% of market share) and 100,000 more watched the final, a total of 1.6 million people in front of their TV (89.3% of market share). Despite a drop compared to the 2014 World Cup final, which "may be explained by the start time," the event "remains very popular in European countries." In Germany, 21.3 million followed the match, for a market share of 76.1% on ZDF. In the Netherlands and Italy, which did not qualify for the World Cup, 3.1 million and 11.7 million football fans, respectively, watched the match on NPO1 and Canale 5. Outside Europe, the final was "also a huge success." In China, 56 million viewers watched the match "despite a late broadcast" (11pm) (BROADBAND TV NEWS, 7/16).
ONLINE VIEWERS: A total of 44.5 million people watched the BBC's TV coverage of the World Cup. There was a record 66.8 million match requests, including live and on demand, on the BBC Sport website and iPlayer. England's quarterfinal win over Sweden drew the highest peak TV share of the tournament at 89%, which was also the BBC's highest online-viewed live program ever, with 3.8 million viewers. Meanwhile, the BBC Sport website brought in a record 49.2 million unique U.K. browsers for the tournament, an increase of 16.9 million from the '14 competition. There were 450,000 unique U.K. browsers to the online player rater, which generated 11.9 million ratings, and more than 2.07 million downloaded and 300,000 streamed the World Cup Daily podcast in June (BBC).
