TV By the Numbers: CFP National Championship, NFL’s Wild Card Weekend
Welcome to our weekly snapshot of TV by the numbers, highlighting the most-watched shows and networks for January 8-14, with insights from Inscape, the currency-grade smart TV ACR data provider and data technology division of Vizio. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).
The NFL playoff action is in full swing, with the first Wild Card games capturing a 7.37% viewership share across the week. The College Football Playoff National Championship, which saw the Michigan Wolverines win their first national title since 1997, took second place with 1.97% of watch-time, an increase from the 1.68% share captured by last year’s championship game.
A few more insights about last week’s most-watched TV programs:
Elsewhere in sports, men’s college basketball rises up the ranking with increased watch-time week-over-week, while football commentary programs including Football Night in America and NFL on Fox Postgame benefited from NFL playoff tune-in.
Chicago Fire rocketed up to No. 12 from No. 43 previously, thanks to rerun marathons on ION and USA Network.
Syndicated sitcoms Friends and The Big Bang Theory also jumped up the chart compared to the week before, with the former fueled by reruns on Nickelodeon and TBS, while The CW and TBS ran marathons of the latter.
Week-over-week ranking newcomers included multiple news programs: America’s Newsroom with Bill Hemmer & Dana Perino (No. 15), ABC World News Tonight With David Muir (No.19), Fox & Friends (No. 20), America Reports with John Roberts & Sandra Smith (No. 23) and CNN News Central (No. 24).
Take a look at the top 25 networks by viewership share over on The Measure.
