Tv Ratings, Nielsen | featured news

Beyoncé Knowles’ autobiographical documentary that premiered last Saturday was the largest audience for an HBO doc since Nielsen amended its method of measuring ratings in 2004, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Nielsen is taking a step towards extending its TV-ratings business to measure online viewing, aiming to gauge how much viewership has drifted away from traditional TV to online outlets.

Nielsen has excluded ratings from the 34-minute power outage during Sunday’s Super Bowl that plunged half of the Superdome into darkness and left TV-industry navel gazers wondering what effect it would have on the costly franchise’s ratings.

The Nielsen company said 36 million people watched Sunday night's coverage, the biggest audience for the second night of a non-U.S. summer Olympics competition since TV began covering them in 1960. Counting the opening ceremonies on Friday, an average of 35.8 million people have tuned in for the three nights, well above the 30.6 million who watched the first three nights in Beijing in 2008 and considerably more than the 24 million who saw the first three nights of the Athens games of 2004.

On Tuesday afternoon I was reading the Sports Business Daily and stumbled upon this interesting set of data regarding the Nielsen Ratings for Sundays at the PGA Championship over the last 15 years. In 7 of the last 15 years, the Sunday Nielsen rating at the PGA Championship exceeded 6.0.

The NBA's championship-winning game for the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday was seen by nearly 24 million people, leading ABC to its most-watched week during the slow summer season in nearly 10 years. The Nielsen Co. said the Mavericks' series victory over the Miami Heat was seen by an average of 17.3 million people over the six games. That's a little less than the viewership for last year's Lakers-Celtics series, which had the advantage of going to a climactic seventh game.

Disney's ABC averaged the most viewers among broadcast networks across its election-night telecast, but did not surpass the wave that cable's Fox News averaged in prime-time, according to Nielsen.