He's happy, were you?
Despite the game being played in the middle of the day when folk should have been at work, the crucial England World Cup group game against Slovenia yesterday afternoon pulled in an astounding 15.4m peak audience on the BBC according to their figures.
The Beeb scooped an impressive 81% audience at the peak on their flagship channel during the afternoon for the game, with the second channel being BBC Two (and Wimbledon) with 800,000 viewers, a 5.5% share of total viewers. This isn’t much surprise as there was no serious competition on the other terrestrial networks.
The game averaged 12.9m viewers, an audience share of 78.2%, although our early overnight stats suggested the figure was closer to 10m.
The actual number of people watching the game is probably much higher as BARB rate a pub full of people as one viewer in their statisitics, and a great deal of the viewers surely just nipped out of the office to the local boozer to keep an eye on the game.
Also, as we reported yesterday, Auntie enjoyed a record online audience for this game, with 800,000 concurrent streams on their website during the match. The BBC Sport website attracted 6m unique users, easily beating the past record of 4.7m set on Monday.
We don’t have the BBC HD figures for the game yet, but that will likely add another million or so viewers to the final tally .
So, all in all, a good day for the Beeb, and a ratings success considering ITV only managed 17 odd million for England games on Friday night and Saturday night earlier in the tournament.
How many people will tune in for the big one against Germany on Sunday afternoon?
Well, we’ll have to wait and see, but the BBC will be hoping for a monster audience (and surely will get one) to try and overtake ITV in the ratings stakes for the tournament.
