The average HBO rating is 1.2million so this was just below average. factor in the timezone it did very well.
HBO's got about 30 million subscribers. I'm not sure how good that is, if it was a US fight at the usual late evening time it'd be pretty bad as WCB averages a bit over a million, but it was on a bit early and Americans are well known for being indifferent to most foreign fighters (except Mexicans) so I imagine they had lower expectations for it.
All cable ratings in the US are combined same day/replay. That means ratings for Game of Thrones on HBO and Dexter on Showtime are actually combined as well. There's no trick to inflate numbers there, this is how things are done. 1 million is a good number for HBO in that timeslot. The record for a boxing match in recent years was 1.9 million for Chavez Jr vs-Rubio. The record for a non boxing match was for a Beyonce documentary which did 1.8 million. A big boxing match will ten to do 1.5 million e.g Broner and Canelo previously. A run of the mill boxing match falls around 1 million normally, so in the US this counts as run of the mill. Educate yourself. First of all HBO is only in 28 million homes in the US. Only a small percentage are said to be watching HBO at any given time. Boxing is on weekends which is the worse day for TV in almost every country, which makes the number of people available to watch even smaller. 1 billion? No chance. Very few, if any, events in history have ever reached 1 billion viewers. The beijing Olympics were said to have reached that number but only because of the massive TV audience in China. Nobody knows who Eubank and Benn are outside the UK and Ireland. They're on par with Khan and Hatton in terms of international popularity. You're trying to claim two domestic UK boxers pulled numbers on par with the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony and potentially, but not likely, some world cup matches. A fight like Haye vs Wlad attracted international attention from across the world and it is said to have been viewed by roughly 500 million. If Froch vs Kessler pulls 1 million buys that could be on par with 10 million viewers give or take.
Steve Kim tweeted that the live broadcast peaked at 493,000 viewers 'Foreign fights are ratings killers', or Americans wouldnt know a good fight if it came up and punched them in the face
But it was widely acclaimed by the American boxing industry So it's a shame ratings like that might mean fights like this being avoided again Froch can fight on hbo or showtime again but it would likely have to be ward/Hopkins/Chavez jnr
the british way of doing tv ratings was better wasnt it worked out using the national grid to see how many people put the kettle on when a tv show finished haha
Love people thinking that American's would want to watch this fight. Half of them probably have no idea that Denmark is a country.
You have to look at it from the American perspective to understand why it did such shockingly bad numbers. To them this fight would have been the same as Jeff Lacy vs Mario Veit taking place here on Sky sports 3 years after both were dominated by Calzaghe. Obviously nobody would care to watch it bar a few hardcore types.
Did Eubank not smash viewing records on Star Network in Asia, SABC in South Africa and feature on the front page of a German newspaper in jodhours and with a cane? Idiot. Eubank was boxing for a few years.
Btw just to add more shite on the compubox thing,HBO had Froch throwing more than 1000 punches while Sky had him at 998(if I remember correctly). How does that happen?