List of most-watched television broadcasts

China

China Central Television's Spring Festival Gala has regularly attracted between 700 million and one billion viewers since the early 1980s.^{[citation needed]} As of 2007, their main evening news broadcast (Xinwen Lianbo) had a daily audience of around 135 million people, a low figure compared to earlier years.^{[citation needed]}

Follow Me! a BBC beginner's English programme broadcast in China as part of the re-establishment of an educational system after the end of the Cultural Revolution.^[1][2] The programme, broadcast on one of China's three channels from 1981 to 1989,^[1] has been estimated to have attracted a nightly audience of 350 million people during the early 1980s.^[2]

Italy

Most-watched television series

In November, 2006, the Accademia dei Telefilm (Academy of Television) published its list of the most-watched 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.^[3][4]

Germany

Most-watched U.S. television series episodes

Top 8 primetime telecasts of all time

• For all UEFA Euro 2008 ratings, see summarization here.
• 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 episodes

(by total number of viewers)^[7]

One-off events

(by total number of viewers)^[7]

Apollo 13 splashdown.

Most-watched films

(by total number of viewers;^[10] dates are when the films were broadcast, not necessarily when they were produced.)

United States

Sources: BBC, Reuters, Nielsen Media Research

Highest rated network telecasts

The Beatles and Elvis Presley's first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and the "Lucy Goes to the Hospital" episode of I Love Lucy hold the records as the highest rated telecasts of all time^{[citation needed]}.

Top 45 network primetime telecasts of all time (1964-2008)

(from January 1964 to February 2008; 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 prevailance 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 "peak" of these shows could be considered 1970-1994.

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).
• Nine 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 premier 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 two "regular" television shows appear on this list; two episodes 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.

Top network primetime telecasts since 2000

(from January 1, 2000 to the present, by viewers; share is the percentage of television sets in use tuned to a specific program; source: Nielsen Media Research and TV Basics)

Most-watched series finales

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)

(sources: Reuters, Variety, Nielsen Media Research, ratings data from USA Today weekly ratings charts)

The most-watched finale is not necessarily a show's most-watched episode. Friends, for example, had 52.9 million viewers for a 1996 episode that followed Super Bowl XXX. 7th Heaven's initial finale was watched by 7.8 million on the WB, but was picked up by the new network The CW, however the show was cancelled after another season and its final episode was watched by 3.3 million people.

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.

At present, All in the Family and American Idol share the record for most consecutive seasons at #1, with five each; Idol is scheduled to return for a new season in early 2010, opening the possibility of it becoming the sole record holder.

These are the programs that finished with the highest average Nielsen rating in each television season:

World

This article contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (March 2009)

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.^[35]

While for these reasons here 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.^[36]

As noted above, China Central Television regularly achieves audiences in the hundreds of millions for its Spring Festival Gala and Xinwen Lianbo.^{[citation needed]}

The most popular regular-broadcast sports event and TV programme is the English Premier League. It is broadcast to 600 million households in 202 countries and reportedly watched by more than 1.2 billion people per week.^{[37][unreliable source?]} 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.^[38]

On 20 July 1969, over 600 million people watched the Apollo 11 landing of the first ever humans to walk on the surface of the moon.^[39]

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.^[40][41] Some breakdowns of the figures suggest 40% of the Japanese television audience,^[42] and 91.8% of the television audience in the Philippines,^[43] with an estimated 51% of the American television audience^[42] when it aired later in America on April 4, 1973.^[42][44]

The funeral of Princess Diana was watched by 2.5 billion people.^[45][46]

The funeral of Pope John Paul II was watched by over 2 billion people worldwide.^[47]

During the 2008 Olympics, it's estimated that 1 billion watched the Men's Basketball game between China and the USA.

On July 7, 2009, following the death of Michael Jackson, it is estimated his funeral was seen by more than 1 billion people worldwide.^[48]

References