Indy100 Staff
Sep 20, 2022
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It looks like more people in the UK watched the Euro 2020 final than tuned into the Queen's funeral, new figures reveal.
Peak TV ratings for the Queen's funeral were 19.5 million on BBC1; 2 million on BBC2; 5.3 million on ITV; 934,000 on Sky News; and 831,000 on the BBC News Channel.
That means there was a combined peak of 28.5 million viewers on the main channels - although there's no word yet on the numbers who viewed it via the smut channels.
We're not being flippant, there, either - media pundit Jim Waterson said that because it was simulcast on a bunch of random channels, it's hard to collate the final figure. For example, he said that 170,000 people watched the Queen's funeral on Sky Sports Main Event.
\u201cRunning the stats to get a conclusive final number on this is complete nightmare because it was simulcast on so many channels. For instance, 170,000 people watched the Queen's funeral on Sky Sports Main Event.\u201d— Jim Waterson (@Jim Waterson) 1663689912
Regardless, these fragmented audiences don't look like they'll be enough to push the Queen's funeral past the Euro 2020 final - which was watched by 30.95 million viewers.
Worldwide, however, viewership could likely beat the Euro 2020 global viewership of 328 million.
One analyst for a streaming site had predicted a 4.1 billion worldwide audience in advance, but that seems way off.
The world's most-watched events typically attract audiences in the high hundreds of millions, and claims that the likes of Live Aid and Live 8 notched up 2 billion viewers are contested.
Given many nations don't have a great fondness for Britain's monarchy, the challenge of attaining those kind of numbers becomes even harder.
Regardless, the event itself was pretty much seamless, although there was some grumbling over perceived 'bitchiness' toward Meghan and Harry. Oh, and over in Australia, some presenters really struggled to identify the new UK PM Liz Truss - we don't blame them.
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