It may have been a thrashing for Queensland, but the opening State of Origin match played in Townsville proved to a ratings winner for Nine.
The audience transition to online streaming was evident with Nine’s coverage of the match setting new records for Broadcast Video On Demand (BVOD) audiences in Australia.
TV Blackbox can reveal Game 1 achieved a Live BVOD Audience of 280,000. The figure was up +56% compared with last year and equates to 32.4 million viewing minutes and 776,000 stream starts.
66% of the BVOD audience watched the match via connected TV devices, while a further 17% watched on computers and 13% on mobile phones.
Meanwhile, the one-sided contest also delivered strong audience figures for Nine in the traditional TV ratings with a national average audience of 2.708 million viewers. (Metro: 1.911 million / Regional: 797,000).
The figure makes it the highest rating broadcast of 2021 so far. The result is also well above Game One in 2020 which was played in November to an Origin record-low audience of 2.378 million nationally (1.598 million metro).
Game One in 2019 secured a national audience of 2.535 million (2.178 million metro)
