Tv Ratings, Super Bowl | featured news

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 Baltimore Ravens' victory over the San Francisco 49ers has set a record for highest overnight ratings in Super Bowl history, the Nielsen company reported Monday....

How many singing competition shows can America watch each week? That’s the question being asked now that NBC’s “The Voice” has started its second season with a bang, while Fox’s long-running “American Idol” has seen its ratings decline. “It’s still very early on for ‘The Voice,' but they got a great start coming out of the Super Bowl with 37.6 million viewers,” media analyst Brad Adgate of Horizon Media told Fox411.com. “The most watched ‘American Idol’ was the finale between Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard in 2003, with a little over 38 million viewers.”

An estimated 111.3 million people watched the New York Giants defeat the New England Patriots, 21-17, Nielsen said Monday afternoon. Of course, it also means a record number of people saw rapper/singer M.I.A. flip off America during Madonna’s halftime show. NBC and the NFL are engaged in what is not yet quite a war of words — maybe a kerfuffle of words — over that incident.

Green Bay's victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl has surpassed last year's record-setting game in the Nielsen Co.'s preliminary ratings measurement of big cities....

The Super Bowl was watched by more than 106 million people, surpassing the 1983 finale of "M-A-S-H" to become the most-watched program in television history....