Monday, December 31, 2007

Blockbuster Ratings for Giants-Patriots


As expected, Saturday night's Patriots-Giants game racked up huge ratings, with the game coming in as the most watched regular season NFL game since 1995.
The historic New England Patriots-New York Giants game pushed past this year's Patriots-Indianapolis Colts thriller to become the most-watched regular-season NFL telecast since 1995.

At least 34.5 million people tuned in to various outlets, including both CBS and NBC, to watch the Pats earn a place in NFL history Saturday by completing a perfect 16-0 regular season with a 38-35 victory over the Giants, according to preliminary estimates released Sunday by Nielsen Media Research.

That tops everything since the Thanksgiving 1995 Kansas City Chiefs-Dallas Cowboys game that averaged 35.7 million viewers. It also was ahead of CBS' 33.8 million viewers for the November 4 Patriots-Colts game.

Saturday's game was the first time since Super Bowl I in the mid-1960s that an NFL game was simulcast on more than one network. It also was available on three channels in New York (the local CBS and NBC outlets as well as Fox-owned indie WWOR) and all three of the Big Three in Boston (CBS, NBC and ABC).

CBS averaged 15.7 million viewers, which was the largest share of any of the networks simulcasting the game. NBC averaged about 13.1 million viewers, with 4.5 million viewers for the NFL Network nationwide and the rest spread across the three over-the-air channels in the New York and Boston markets (WWOR, Boston's WCVB and New Hampshire's WMUR).

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