Last night's Stanley Cup Finals game six where the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup four games to two over the Pittsburgh penguins had over 7 million viewers in the preliminary overnights and was the highest rated game in the US in eight years. It earned a 4.4/7 (rating share) during primetime (8p-11p ET) and was the best performance in a game six since a 2000 New Jersey/Dallas matchup had a 5.2/11. It was a 100% increase over two years ago when Edmonton faced Carolina. It was the highest ratings for NBC since they reacquired NHL in 2004. NBC reports a peak rating of 5.3/9 from 10:30p-11:00pm ET.
Here are the local market top ten for the broadcast, led of course by Pittsburgh and Detroit. Note: I know that these numbers are only for NBC viewing in Detroit. I'm trying to dig up the CBC numbers for the Detroit market from our friends at Nielsen so that I can give a full view of viewing for the Detroit local market. I've heard from many in Detroit that nobody there watches the games on NBC.
That's obviously not true, judging from these numbers, but I agree it's better to give the full picture of the local market viewing including those watching via CBC, and will add them if I get them:
WEDNESDAY'S TOP 10 MARKETS:
1. Pittsburgh, 37.4/51
2. Detroit, 30.6/45
3. Buffalo, 10.9/16
4. Denver, 6.6/11
5. St. Louis, 5.7/9
6. Richmond, 5.6/9
T7. Philadelphia, 5.5/9
T7. Columbus, 5.5/9
T9. Minneapolis, 5.1/10
T9. Fort Myers, 5.1/10
Just for the sake of clarity, the above rankings are by HH Rating and rank the top cities in terms of percentage viewing. I know Richmond (Richmond-Petersburg, Va) is raising some eyebrows. This just means that 5.5% of the television homes in the Richmond market were watching that game. New York is the largest market with almost 7.4 million television homes according to Nielsen. Richmond is the 59th market with only around 527,000 homes. But 5.6% of the Richmond market would be eclipsed by a 1/2% rating in the New York Market in terms of total viewing. But as a % more people in Richmond market watched.
Here's a full list of the Nielsen Designated Market Areas with "people meters" so you can see the size of the various markets according to Nielsen.
Source: NBC
Good ratings. If there was a game 7 the NBC and the NHL would have had a good opportunity to have claimed that they would have won the ratings for the day overall and 18-49 etc. Again the one problem for whoever broadcast the NHL games nationally there will always be those who have lived on or near the Canadian Border or have access to CBC on cable like Seattle they will never be able to convert those fans. NBC did a solid job of calling the games.
Good luck finding the CBC Windsor numbers. I’ve never seen Canadian overnights. Up here it’s run by bbm.ca, and they usually only release weekly nationals plus Toronto/Vancouver/Quebec/Calgary locals. I have no idea how Nielsen would even calculate those numbers because, obviously, the CBC won’t pay for US viewing numbers and I doubt that anybody in Detroit would pay for Canadian ones. It would be interesting to see, though.
It’s highlights an interesting market situation though, where American border stations consider Canadian cities in their “market.” i grew up in Nova Scotia, and all of our US networks came from Detroit (hence many Maritimers being scared to death of the US in general). Do those viewers have any value to the Detroit networks? Obviously not for local ads, but what about national ones? How would they even measure these viewers? When I lived in Montreal, the US networks came over air from Burlington, VT, and they included Montreal in their slogans. But how much value did those Montreal viewers really have to Burlington networks?
Here in Southern Ontario, our cables from Detroit (PBS from Erie, MNTV from Cleveland). There’s an obvious value to the Detroit networks for our eyeballs as people frequently cross the border to shop, but is that something the Detroit networks can charge for if they can’t measure it?
Doug, I’m not looking for overnight numbers for Windsor, but rather local viewing of CBC in the Detroit market. It wouldn’t really be calculated any differently than viewing of TBS in the Detroit market which is certainly both measured and tracked at that level. They measure what you watch – local channels, cable channels, PBS, whatever. So I’m sure they can measure this for the Detroit market, though I’m not yet certain they actually track it, or whether they will release the data.
Buffalo has CBC also. I know most people here prefer CBC to NBC to watch hockey.
I’m not really buying most people prefer CBC — if that’s the case nobody watched anything BUT NHL in Detroit as 47% of the TVs in use were watching the game on NBC. In any case, Buffalo is #50 in market size. its CBC viewing would have a negligible effect on national totals in the US.
Moose is just dumb.
Good job NBC/NHL–Anyone know what the numbers were in the NYC area for game 6 (I have a bet going on this) Thanks
There were very wide-spread power outages in the Washington DC area. Otherwise, I would think they would have been in the top 10 again.
There were very wide-spread power outages in the Washington DC area. Otherwise, I would think they would have been in the top 10 again.