The AFL Grand Final between Brisbane and Sydney drew the highest audience since 2016
The nation’s TV ratings service, OzTAM, delivered the TV ratings more than seven hours late but it was a top result for key AFL free-to-air broadcaster Channel 7.
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The Brisbane Lions’ 60-point AFL Grand Final victory over the Sydney Swans delivered free-to-air broadcaster Channel 7 its biggest audience for a premiership decider in eight years.
The official ratings data released by OzTAM on Sunday night showed 4.024 million viewers tuned in to the season finale, including 655,000 viewers on Seven’s free streaming platform 7Plus.
This is the highest AFL grand final TV audience since the 2016 clash between the Bulldogs and Swans, when 4,090,000 people tuned in to see the Bulldogs win by 22 points.
Saturday’s ratings represent a good result for Seven, given that the result was a blowout and was well and truly over by three-quarter time, meaning tens of thousands of viewers are likely to have switched off before the full-time siren.
With two non-Victorian teams playing, Seven was privately hoping that the Lions-Swans battle might break the all-time ratings record for an AFL match, given that the sizeable markets of Sydney, Brisbane and the perennial fans in Melbourne were all expected to tune in en masse.
Indeed, the four highest-rating AFL grand finals of the past 20 years have all featured the Sydney Swans.
However, Saturday’s final figure of 4.024 million viewers fell short of the overall ratings record, which remains the 4.49 million TV audience for the 2005 grand final between the Sydney Swans and the West Coast Eagles.
While the AFL insists it has no plans in the near future to switch the grand final to an evening timeslot, Seven, which holds the broadcast rights to the season finale through to 2031, will continue to make the argument for a night game, given the ratings boost it would deliver.
“Our preference is for a prime time AFL grand final,” Seven Network director of sport Chris Jones told The Australian.
“Imagine how good that would be, for the fans, the code and for Seven?
“We have a great relationship with the AFL and are in conversations with them all the time about a range of issues.”
But the announcement of the grand final TV audience almost didn’t happen on Sunday, when ratings agency OzTAM experienced a “technical issue”.
Industry sources told The Australian they were “frustrated” about the disruption to the release of ratings on what is one of the biggest ratings events of the year.
Numerous alerts were sent to the TV networks and media outlets on Sunday to inform them problems were afoot and affecting the release of the results.
“Nielsen has experienced a technical issue with yesterday’s TV ratings data that has resulted in a delay to the data release,” the OzTAM spokeswoman said.
“Quality assurance is an important part of the Nielsen measurement process and it is critical that the data, when reported, is accurate.
“OzTAM apologises for the inconvenience caused and is working closely with Nielsen to have the ratings data available as soon as possible.”
The results were finally released at 7.06pm AEDT.
OzTAM is owned by the country’s major commercial television broadcasters including Seven, Nine and Ten, and they provide daily and weekly figures 365 days a year.
The measurement system provides two daily VOZ (Virtual Australia) ratings system reports including total TV overnight top 30 programs and total TV consolidated seven-day top 30 programs.
In January OZTAM rolled out a revamped data measurement system to monitor Australian TV viewing habits and gauge what people watched across linear TV or broadcast viewing on demand (BVOD).
Viewers only have to watch as little as 15 seconds of a program for it to register on the measurement system.
Audience is calculated by the number of viewers watching each minute of a program divided by the duration of the program.
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Originally published as The AFL Grand Final between Brisbane and Sydney drew the highest audience since 2016
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