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Viewers prefer tradition for Royal Wedding

Australian viewers voted for a traditional Royal Wedding broadcast over an irreverent one.

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Australian viewers voted for a traditional Royal Wedding broadcast over an irreverent one last night as Seven’s broadcast of the event topped the night and TEN’s cheeky commentary tanked.

Seven’s broadcast ranked first with viewers, followed by Nine, ABC1 and TEN a distant fourth.

There was certainly a big audience glued to their sets for the night, but with coding of various segments and AFL / NRL taking over in some cities it is difficult to make clear-cut comparisons.

The highest ranked audience of the night appeared to be Seven’s early portion of the lead-up to the wedding, around 6:30pm AEST, with nearly 1.74m viewers. With regional viewers added in it was up to 2.38m.

By the time the wedding itself aired, 8pm AEST, Seven had AFL commitments in some cities and continued the wedding on 7TWO. Seven’s audience was 1.51m for the ceremony but 7TWO had another 513,000.

Nine’s Dame Edna and Today team reached up to 1.46m. By 8:30pm Nine had to switch to NRL in some cities and continued on GEM.  The ceremony was 717,000 with another 163,000 on GEM.

The ABC averaged 1.1m viewers across its entire evening broadcast, and therefore does not give us a clear comparison.

TEN’s lighthearted commentary with Fitzy and Wippa plummeted to just 349,000. TEN was shunned by most viewers, with its biggest audience for the night was TEN News at 463,000. However a primetime edition of The Circle at 385,000 was actually higher than their ceremony broadcast and three times higher than its average morning audience.

In network shares Seven stormed the night with 39.7% over Nine 26.7%, ABC 20.8%, TEN 9.7% and SBS% 3.1%.

7TWO reached as high as 8.0% for the night.

Week 18

66 Responses

  3. I can’t imagine what Ten were thinking. In London they had Lucy MacDonald (who is great and was performing very well); Hamish (serious-ish journo) and Carrie (for the girls to relate to). Why didn’t they just use them for the commentary?

    The Wedding Project was good – the Circle woeful. I turned off the Fitzy/Wippa commentary after a few seconds. Ten not only had too many adverts, but anyone channel surfing would have noticed they were on a 2-3 second delay from the other channels.

    Dear Ten, when every network is screening the same thing – don’t give people three reasons to turn over…

  4. Seven do these things well. Well done to all. Who would have thought – imagine what Nine’s ratings were for Diana and Charles’ wedding?! What Nine would do to go back 30 years. Rest in Peace Mr Kerry Packer.

  5. I flicked around and found ABC1’s feed of the BBC by far the best. Channel 10 went to ads just as Will and Harry arrived at the church. Massive fail.

  6. I prefered Nine as it was for me the right mix – in between seriousness and light-heartedness. As for Ten, the only thing I liked about them was their royal-style watermark. Thought that was pretty clever, everything else, well I guess the numbers speak for themselves.

  7. I watched it on BBC World News as it had a much smaller/cleaner watermark than UKTV and not one single ad in 6 hours. I found the church service a bit boring so flicked over to TEN for a minute but could barely hear the audio commentary and it also sounded like you could hear someone elses commentary in the background.

  8. lol @ TENs fail! I watched the E coverage, and it was awesome. No offence to TEN, but the Royal Wedding is a historic and sophisticated event – why give it ‘cheeky’ commentary for? Lame!

  9. @CD – “a national drivetime radio show (and has done so for three over 2 years) which has recently been broadcast out of Sydney”. Well, I don’t listen to drive-time radio, I don’t live in the Sydney radio coverage area, and so, I’ve no idea who he is, never heard him, never heard of him.

  10. Ten’s approach was not “lighthearted”, it was idiotic. Seven was the best, but they were damn rude to switch to the football … how shallow … we watched on 7Two! Nine was somewhere between the two, Edna was particularly disappointing … she needs a a script … all too try hard and failed.

    The wedding was beautiful, moving, the service was boring, but the rest was wonderful! Very uplifting, just what the world needs right now!

  12. As someone who chose to go out to a restaurant so that I could avoid the whole event (only to find all the restaurants packed with customers joking about their need to escape) I am surprised by the numbers who watched, and the numbers who are commenting here today. Perhaps it was because there was no real alternative on TV last night!

  13. Flicked over to ABC24 to see it in HD. Was a bit of a shambles. Captions said you could watch it live on ABC1 even though it was live on ABC24. Other captions flashed up news such as “Kate is preparing to leave hotel” at the same time as she was exchanging vows. Finally gave up when commentator in Sydney studio talked over the exchange of vows. ABC24 is fast becoming an embarassment. Maybe they should just outsource to Sky and pack up the tent.

  15. @Daniel, I heard on a radio interview earlier today that TV ratings for the Royal Wedding was 4.4M, really an epic figure. However, it will actually be a lot more than that, as it does not take into account people watching at pubs, clubs, at parties, on pay TV stations, etc. Factoring all that in, I’d say total viewership was probably 6.5M plus, easy.

  17. uktv was the best for me….although i flicked to channel 7 and it was actually quiet good…i forgot i was on 7 for about an hour….

    flicked to 9 & 10 and ads so i just flicked back…

    will we find out the total number of aussie viewers for the wedding?

  18. Seriously TEN what where you thinking?

    I watch part of the start and switched between the channels and like most others I think 7 was the best for FTA but PayTV with UKTV and SkyNews was better and the clearest, even for those of us without HD Austar.

    As far as I saw SBS didn’t cover it live, is that true?

  19. I liked sevens coverage i flicked over to ten for a bit and was appalled im a 23 y.o old male and even i find fitzy repulsive seriously how does he get gig on tv ? hes like that annoying drunk guy at the pub who refuses to leave. the whole thing was in bad taste and not remotely funny

  20. @Kenny – I’m not defending Ten’s coverage (I watched ABC’s), but in defence of Wippa, he does host a national drivetime radio show (and has done so for three over 2 years) which has recently been broadcast out of Sydney, so the “I’m not from Melbourne” argument (either am I) is not really valid

  21. I thought TEN’s commentary was good, an alternative to the seriousness, especially given Dame Edna didn’t commentate throughout the service but only before and after. However, the audio on TEN was delayed by around 10 seconds in comparison to the video feed, so the commentary was somewhat irrelevant by the time it was broadcast.

    I didn’t think Seven were that great, and I wasn’t impressed with either 7 or 9 who showed their ‘live’ watermarks in the lead-up to the ceremony, when many clips were obviously pre-recorded, such as interviews.

    Impressed with ABC for streaming their coverage on their website, in addition to ABC News 24.

    Cool that is was on Youtube, too and that they’re rebroadcasting the entire thing on a loop and the ceremony and other highlights are on-demand.

  23. Epic figures for the wedding especially when you consider many people had wedding parties. The usual numbers would be multiplied much greater as each screen had 10-15 viewers

  24. And in a case of “dejavu all over again” GEM is rerunning, on Saturday afternoon, a whole ? hours of the wedding.
    Complete with “9 Live” watermark. Hello. It’s Not 9, it’s GEM, and it’s not Live.
    Didn’t 9 bother to record a clean feed last night?

  25. I flicked around, but the clear winner was the BBC, with their telecast shown on ABC and UKTV. No ads and the commentators actually knew what they were talking about. Karl, Lisa, etc, were appalling.

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