Another big weekend in sport with Rugby League Tests occurring, while WBBL, NBL and A-League continued full steam ahead into Summer. But as always at this time of the year, the big dog in the yard was the horse racing.
Tuesdays Melbourne Cup on 10 scored a national audience of 1.92 million, including 1.44 million in the metro areas. An additional 90,000 watched the great race via tenplay, making it easily the most-watched sporting event of the weekend, despite being well down on 2018’s audience of 2.5 million – no figures were available for the racing.com channel coverage.
Rugby League
In the Oceania Cup, Australia v Tonga was watched by 435,000 on Nine and Fox, while 236,000 watch England take on New Zealand.
The weekend’s matches take the total NRL viewing for the season to 117 million at an average of 474,000, and more than 190 million hours of live professional rugby league.
Cricket
Australia v Pakistan in the T20 series rated 198,000 and 170,000 on Fox Cricket on Sunday.
115,000 watched the first innings of the WBBL’s Stars v Sixers on Sunday ion the five cities, while 163,000 backed up for the second innings.
Fridays WBBL game between the Scorchers and Renegades top-scored on Fox cricket with 40,000.
WBBL metro ratings on 7/7mate averaging 99/000 for the first innings and 105,000 in the second. Fox averages are around 29,000 with 1/3rd of matches unreported (same issue as A-league, not making the Sunday Fox top 20)
Rugby World Cup Final
The Fox broadcast of the 2019 Rugby World Cup final had an average audience of 354,000. A further 763,000 watched on Ten nationally.
A-League
Saturdays Western Sydney v Brisbane game on the ABC averaged 53,000 viewers in the metro area. Victory v Western Untied was the top rating game on Fox with 40,000.
ABC metro broadcasts this season are averaging 49k, while on Fox the average is around 31,000 for the year (about 1/3rd of matches not reported)
NBL
Sundays New Zealand v Perth game was the highest rating NBL game on Viceland with 21,000, while 29,000 watched Monday nights Melbourne United v Sydney game on ESPN.
Average metro tv ratings on Viceland are 21,000 per game – just under the 22,000 average at the end of 2018-19. ESPN broadcasts average around 21,000 with about half the season unreported to date.
Both SBS broadcast NBA matches averaged 15,000 in the five cities on the weekend with the season so far averaging 16,000.
Horse Racing
The Victoria Derby on Ten rated 234,000 nationally (181,000 metro), while the Golden Eagle on Seven rated 255,000 (151,000).
Motorsport
Sundays Malaysian MotoGP rated 56,000, while Sundays qualifying for the US Grand Prix had 55,000 viewers on Fox, while Monday’s race came in at 70,000.
Jason Lassey is a sports industry blogger focussed on the Attendances, Financials and TV Ratings of professional sport in Australia. A long time Carlton supporter, he longs for the heady days of 1995 to come around once more.
Twitter – @footyindustryAU
Website – http://www.footyindustry.com/