France World Cup win scores for SBS with 700,000 viewers
A bumper audience of almost 700,000 television viewers watched SBS’s coverage of France’s breathless World Cup final win.
A bumper audience of almost 700,000 television viewers watched SBS’s coverage of France’s World Cup final win in a breathless six-goal thriller against Croatia.
The highest-scoring World Cup final since England beat West Germany 4-2 in 1966 peaked at 684,275 viewers at 1.48am AEST, according to overnight figures from OzTAM.
Ratings for the entire match up until the final whistle at around 2.45am will not be available until Tuesday morning, which means that consolidated figures including online streaming will take the audience even higher.
An average of 583,000 viewers watched France’s 4-2 win, of which 583,000 viewers watched in metropolitan markets, and 99,000 viewers tuned in from regional Australia.
As many as 789,426 viewers watched the live match for five minutes or more, a sizeable audience in an unfavourable timeslot that some commercial free-to-air broadcasters would be happy with in prime time.
The results underscore why broadcasters and new entrants into the sports rights market such as tech giants and telcos will fork out high prices for live events.
As viewers watch more films and dramas on-demand, live sport is holding its own against these changing viewing patterns.
With all the drama and tension inherent in a big match, live sport must be watched live rather than on demand, guaranteeing broadcasters big audiences.
For advertisers, live sport not only delivers scale, but also the attention of time-poor consumers in a fragmented marketplace.
Despite some technical issues and a par performance from the Socceroos, the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia was a ratings winner for SBS.
TV executives will be relieved by the overall numbers, which show TV viewing still generates the biggest audience in any moment and can therefore obtain a premium from major advertisers and sponsors.
Even the Belgium-England battle for third place, which kicked off at 12am AEST on Sunday, attracted a peak audience of 463,609 viewers on SBS.
Despite early morning schedules that were often inconvenient for Australian viewers, the Socceroos drew over 3 million viewers during the group stage in June.
“We’re absolutely delighted with the support the Socceroos are getting at home,” Football Federation Australia CEO David Gallop said last week.
“The television audiences and the media coverage has been huge.
“It’s a great boost to all the players and staff. The team is representing Australia on the world’s biggest sporting stage and millions of football fans around the country [were] getting right behind them.”
One company which won’t be breathing a sigh of relief is Optus, which handed over each of the World Cup’s 64 games to SBS after a raft of difficulties and outages with its streaming service.
The telco lost millions of dollars and, arguably more importantly, a crucial opportunity to steal customers from Telstra and Vodafone.
Overseas, the tournament shattered records in Britain and France, with 26.6 million people tuning in to see England’s defeat at the hands of Croatia in the semi-finals on British broadcaster ITV, the highest audience for a single game in that country ever.
In France, meanwhile, an average audience of 19.1 million viewers watched the country’s semi-final against Belgium on TF1, with the audience peaking at 22.3 million viewers.
Those are huge numbers any way you cut it and show why tech giants like Amazon and Facebook — along with Optus — are aggressively bidding for live sports rights.
The World Cup’s broadcasting future is unclear beyond 2022, when the tournament will travel to Qatar.
“SBS has the rights for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar,” a spokesman for SBS said when asked about whether Optus will be on board next time around.
“Our focus is on delivering the best 2018 FIFA World Cup experience and it is too early to speculate what might happen in 2022 and 2026.”
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