Last night’s live coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games Opening Ceremony delivered an 84 Share, meaning 84% of everyone viewing television in Canada last night was watching the coverage on Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium. Airing live across 11 television networks in 11 languages and online at CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca, the television coverage peaked at 15.6 million viewers at 7:14 p.m. PT when Team Canada entered BC Place during the Parade of Nations. As announced earlier, the broadcast has become the most-watched television event in Canadian history with a preliminary estimated audience of 13.3 million viewers.
On the Consortium websites, nearly one million video views were generated online during the ceremony. A total of 1.6 million unique visitors embraced content on CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca throughout the day.
“The Canadian Olympic team will break records at these Games,” said Ivan Fecan, President and Chief Executive Officer, CTVglobemedia and Chief Executive Officer, CTV Inc. “But, the first record was broken last night.”
According to the Consortium’s CUME (Canadian Unique Multimedia Experience) index, 26 million Canadians in all experienced Vancouver 2010 during Day 1 on the Consortium’s platforms, representing 78% of all Canadians.
Day 1 Television Recap:
– On English-language television, the Opening Ceremony was watched by nearly 9 million viewers alone on CTV (8,948,000), while all-sports stations TSN and Rogers Sportsnet delivered an average of 1.32 million and 868,000 viewers respectively.
– On French-language television, the Opening Ceremony attracted an average audience of 942,000 viewers on V, with an additional 906,000 viewers on RDS.
– CTV’s all-day coverage of TORCH RELAY: THE JOURNEY HOME was watched in whole or in part by a staggering 8 million viewers throughout its nine-hour broadcast, and saw an average audience of 700,000.
– The Consortium’s English language OLYMPIC PREVIEW SHOW averaged 4.7 million viewers from 4-6 p.m. PT while the French-language LE GRAND DECOMPTE delivered more than 800,000 viewers.
Day 1 Online Recap:
– Canadians spent more than 133,472 hours in total watching live video at CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca – the only Canadian sites with live coverage of the Games.*
– Page views for CTVOlympics.ca on Day 1 of the Games reached 9.4 million with 1.7 million video views.
– RDSolympiques.ca delivered 803,443 page views and 151,045 video views, marking the most-trafficked day in the websites’ history.
– Interest in yesterday’s tragic luge accident resulted in many site visitors getting acquainted with Canadian luger Jeff Christie. His profile on the site topped all athlete profile views for the day.
– During the Opening Ceremony, more than 50,000 Canadians participated through their online communities in a live chat through the interface live blog on CTVOlympics.ca
– Within minutes of posting the words to Shane Koyczan’s moving poem, We Are More, roughly 1,000 @CTVOlympics Twitter followers clicked through to the text of the poem on the CTVOlympics.ca site.
