A national audience of close to 2.5 Million Australian’s has tuned in to watch the highly emotional state funeral for Australian cricket legend, Shane Warne.
Broadcast across multiple networks, the highly emotional production has attracted universal praise for viewers.
The decision by Seven to air the commercial free broadcast on its main channel proved to a success with viewers attracting a national audience of 1.165 million viewers.
Outside of Victoria, the 9 Network opted to air the event on its 9Gem multichannel for a national free-to-air audience of 521k.
The 10 network also made the decision to split its coverage across different channels with achieving a national viewership of 242k
Data obtained by TV Blackbox reveals the simulcast coverage across the channels of Sky News, FOX Cricket, and FOX Footy attracted a further 275k on Foxtel and Kayo.
A further 239k watched nationally via the ABC News channel, while an additional 50k watched on the Sky News Regional free-to-air channel.
Ratings for the event are likely to rise significantly further once BVOD and catch-up audience data is added to the total.
Thank god one good journalist picked up on the ludicrous claims of a billion or more people tuning in to Warnie’s stadium beatification. All the commercial networks bandied the ridiculous one billion or more figure and ABC TV Breakfast outdid them all by repeatedly forecasting a viewing audience of 1.5 billion – i.e around one in five people on the planet tuning in. Where were the ABC fact checkers?