The following is a list of most-watched television broadcasts, organized by country and based on various criteria.
Australia
The list below is the top ten most watched broadcasts in Australia since 2001. These figures only represent the Capital City audience and not the Regional audience.
The most watched television broadcast in Canadian history was the Gold medal game of the Men's ice hockey tournament at the 2010 Winter Olympics. 16.6 million Canadians watched the entire game, roughly one-half the country's population.[1] 13.3 million Canadians watched the Opening Ceremonies, which was the previous record.[2] Many believed the final game of the 1972 Summit Series had up to 18 million viewers, but those rumours have been proven false, as only 4.3 million people watched that.[citation needed] 10.3 million people watched the gold medal final of the 2002 Winter Olympics.[3]
Follow Me! a BBCbeginner's English programme broadcast in China as part of the re-establishment of an educational system after the end of the Cultural Revolution.[4][5] The programme, broadcast on one of China's three channels from 1981 to 1989,[4] has been estimated to have attracted a nightly audience of 350 million people during the early 1980s.[5]
Italy
Most-watched television series
In November, 2006, the Accademia dei Telefilm (Academy of TV series) published its list of the most-watched American television programmes in Italian history, based on the highest-rated episode for each series. The episodes all came from U.S. television programmes, with the top five consisting of ER, Beverly Hills 90210, House, Lost and Charmed. At the time of the survey, only Beverly Hills 90210 had finished its original run on Italian television, the rest were still airing.[6][7]
The Scarf, a thriller series by Francis Durbridge, got up to 89 per cent market share in January 1962. The number of viewers was not measured at that time. The series is still considered the biggest so-called "Straßenfeger" (a television broadcast which is so popular as to leave the streets deserted) in German television history. One year later, the Tim Frazer series by Durbridge went for a market share between 80 and 93 per cent.
United Kingdom
Most-watched programmes (excluding sporting events and news coverage)
Post-1981 figures verified by the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB)
Top 45 network primetime telecasts of all time (1964–2010)
(from January 1964 to February 2010; ranked by rating, or "Percentage of Households." Households could include many viewers; share is the percentage of television sets in use tuned to a specific program; source: Nielsen Media Research and Variety)
Few post-1990 telecasts are listed. Before Fox's launch in October 1986, the Big Three television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—dominated nationwide broadcasting. Today, with the ubiquity of cable and satellite television, typical American households have a far greater choice of programming from dozens or hundreds of specialty and broadcast channels, as opposed to the handful of broadcast channels during the era represented by most programs on this list. More recently, increased ease and prevalence of watching programming other than at its original airing (in reruns, by recording, by time-shifting, on an on-demand TV service, by internet download, etc.) decreases the need for masses of viewers to tune into a single broadcast as well. The Internet has also drawn viewers away from television.
The 45 shows on this list could be grouped into just five categories:
21 are National Football League playoff games (20 Super Bowls plus the 1981 NFC Championship game that preceded the highest ranked of these Super Bowls).
Eight are from mini series (six Roots and two The Thorn Birds)
Three are the final episode of a regular series (The Fugitive, M*A*S*H, Cheers).
Eleven are special/rare or highly anticipated events
the first two US television performances by The Beatles
the two parts of the Olympic figure skating competition featuring Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding
two consecutive years of Bob Hope entertaining US troops in Vietnam at Christmas
the two-part television premiere of the classic movie Gone With the Wind
one year of the annual Academy awards
the television movie The Day After
and the Dallas episode revealing who shot J.R.
Only one "regular" television show appears on this list: an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.
The allocation of the 45 shows across the four major US networks are: 15 shows on each of NBC and CBS, 13 shows on ABC, and two shows on Fox. The 23 sports events on the list could be considered to carry their own audience, as compared to the notion that the efforts of any particular network caused the high viewership. All Super Bowl Ratings up to Super Bowl XLIII can be found in full here.[46]
(sources: Reuters, Variety, Nielsen Media Research, ratings data from USA Today weekly ratings charts)
Annual top-rated U.S. TV series
Nielsen began compiling ratings for television beginning in 1950. Prior to that year, television ratings were compiled by a number of other sources, including C. E. Hooper (which was bought out by Nielsen in February 1950) and Variety.
American Idol holds the record for most consecutive seasons at #1, with six, while All in the Family, and The Cosby Show share second place for most consecutive seasons at #1, with five each.
These are the programs that finished with the highest average Nielsen rating in each television season:
Worldwide viewership statistics cited in press releases by television networks, FIFA, the NFL and others have been questioned by independent groups and audience figures cited in billions are considered practically unverifiable.[65] While for these reasons there are no exact figures available for global television events, a report by IPG media agency Initiative Worldwide stated that the 2006 FIFA World Cup was the most-watched sporting event of that year with an average 95 Million viewers per match.[66]
On 7 July 2009, following the death of Michael Jackson, it is estimated his funeral was seen by 2.5 to 3 billion people worldwide.[67][68]
The most popular regular-broadcast sports event and TV programme is the Barclays Premier League. It is broadcast to 600 million households in 202 countries.[73] Even this figure may be an underestimate as the number of people watching are said to watch on pirated set top boxes and illegal Internet streams.[74]
A satellite broadcast for an Elvis Presley show live from Hawaii, titled "Aloha from Hawaii" on January 14, 1973 is reported to have reached over 1 billion viewers globally.[75][76] Some breakdowns of the figures suggest 40% of the Japanese television audience,[77] and 91.8% of the television audience in the Philippines,[78] with an estimated 51% of the American television audience[77] when it aired later in America on April 4, 1973.[77][79]
On July 20, 1969, over 600 million people watched the Apollo 11 landing of the first ever humans to walk on the surface of the moon.[80]
^ abArango, Tim (February 27, 2009). "Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-02-28. Broadcast television, for decades an oligarchy of three networks, was once the locus for most of the nation's shared cultural moments — almost 83 percent of households in the United States watched Elvis Presley's appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in September 1956, which is said to be the largest audience when measured by that metric. In terms of number of viewers, the final episode of "M*A*S*H," in 1983, set the record with about 106 million viewers.{{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
