13m watch Prince Philip funeral in UK
Brits turned to the BBC, while Seven topped coverage in Australia.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News
Almost 13 million Britons tuned in to watch Prince Philip’s funeral – more than the figure for Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey (12.4 million viewers).
The BBC’s live coverage of the day- fronted by Huw Edwards – had 11.4 million viewers at its peak, nearly ten times the 1.2 million ITV pulled in.
The BBC’s average viewer figure for yesterday’s funeral stood at 6.6 million, while ITV’s was significantly lower, at just 851,300.
Numbers will grow higher once BBC News, Sky News, and CNN International are added.
In Australia Seven led coverage of Prince Philip’s funeral on Saturday night at up to 430,000 viewers, with a particularly high crowd in Perth where programming benefited from being 2 hours earlier than the East Coast.
The Funeral of The Duke of Edinburgh Channel 7 430,000
9News Special – The Funeral of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Ed Channel 9 275,000
The Funeral of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh Channel 9 212,000
ABC News: Funeral of Prince Philip – Special Coverage-LE ABC News 172,000
The Funeral of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh Channel 10 147,000
Funeral of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh-LE ABCÂ 137,000
Funeral of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh-LE ABC News 126,000
Source: Deadline, Daily Mail
8 Responses
That’s no where near the real figure. 7.7 million people watched on the BBC News channel on YouTube, and it was also on their Facebook and Twitter pages. The Royal Family channel on YouTube streamed the funeral but the number of views has been hidden so their is no viewing total. The funeral was also available on numerous streams across the internet.
Considering how good the UK’s weather was on Saturday, and it being the first weekend of relaxed post-lockdown restrictions in England, there would have been plenty watching via streaming options on devices rather than stuck inside watching the TV (I was watching via BBC iPlayer). I wonder whether those figures will also be added?
The captions at ABC were really bad. After ‘order of the gutter’ (garter) and songs not being captioned, I switched to Nine (who also took the BBC feed) and they were perfect.
Since the ratings were so low on this, I’m hoping we can avoid the wall to wall coverage on every channel when the Queen goes, but no such luck.
Whilst I can access a wealth of any other content just on catch up services, let alone including SVOD as well, the TV coverage didn’t bother me as much as the radio coverage did. I fall asleep to talk radio, and it was a choice of either NZ, the USA or podcasts. Literally every channel here in every city (using a smart speaker) had the funeral live.
The ratings show that many millions of people are not interested.
I watched on the ABC and it was wonderful, no watermarks and no unnecessary commentary as they took their feed from the BBC. Very respectful.
It wasn’t a difficult choice to make with 7 having the manners not to block part of the image with a large title banner on the lower screen like 9 had.
Exactly. I scrolled through the channels to see who was doing what. The intrusive solid blue logo on 9 was ridiculous, and some would say, disrespectful. 7 had nothing – not even a watermark (as opposed to their usual perceived need to have a garish red ‘7 News Live’ on everything).
Should be noted that the funeral service was also repeated the next day by the networks at various times-some people may have recorded it to watch later as well.