Seven was the choice of the biggest TV audience wanting to follow the royal wedding. Seven partnered with ITV for its coverage and started earlier in the afternoon than other local options. Seven’s coverage was anchored by the ever reliable Melissa Doyle and featured plenty of guest commentators including UK TV icon Angela Rippon.
Seven had a combined metro and regional average audience of 2.59m watching the ceremony and a metro average of 1.95m.
Here are the average metro audiences for Saturday night:
Seven: Ceremony 1.95m, Arrivals 1.73m, Procession 1.50m, Countdown 1.41m, 7News 1.27m
Nine: Wedding 1.47m, Post 1.14m, Pre 974,000, 9News 800,000
ABC: News 524,000, Ceremony 506,000, Procession 427,000, Arrivals 410,000, Countdown 361,000
SBS: Ceremony 129,000, Post 112,000
All networks seemed to do a poor job of identifying many of the guests as they entered the church apart from the obvious household names like Oprah, Clooney, Fergie etc. It wasn’t a traditional red carpet arrival to be sure, but it had certainly been hyped like one in the lead-up. It is understandable some of the Australian commentators didn’t know who was who, but poor form from the British networks.
The Saturday night metro primary shares were:
Seven 36.4%, Nine 26.0%, ABC 9.9%, TEN 3.4%, SBS 2.9%.
On subscription TV, UKTV easily did the best with its BBC coverage attracting 180,000.
Sky News carried UK Sky News coverage and did 70,000, just days before the channel finally gets its dedicated home on the Foxtel platform.
BBC World News also did well with 52,000.
Breakfast TV Royal Wedding Week
The wedding might be over but there was still plenty of coverage live from London. Today’s Lizzie Pearl and Sunrise’s Edwina Bartholomew were both reporting from outside Buckingham Palace this morning.
At Nine, Sylvia Jeffreys and Ben Fordham were hosting Today with Karl and Georgie making their way back from Windsor.
At Seven, Sam Armytage is taking some time off after the wedding. David Koch managed to make it back after a massive weekend that saw him fly out of London on Friday to Shanghai to watch Port Adelaide win in China and then back on another plane to return to Sydney on Sunday.
The week 20 metro averages for the two commercial TV breakfast shows were:
Sunrise 247,000
Today 239,000
Both averages were down slightly on their previous week.
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