The Royal Wedding has proven to be a success as planned, but it was not quite at the level that some promoters had been anticipating for worldwide TV ratings.

Despite Friday’s ceremonies with Prince William wedding the now-Princess Catherine landing a spot on the top 10 UK ‘special event’ broadcasts of all time (in terms of number of viewers), but contrary to its description by one network as ‘the social event of the millennium’, only landed #8 on this all-time list. Early predictions suggest that just over 26.2 million unique British viewers saw the event live across five host channels (BBC1, ITV1, Sky News, Sky Living, and the BBC News channel).

That is slightly less than the 28.4m in 1981 who saw Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wed (an event that producers were hoping to beat in terms of viewership), although with modern coverage online also an option, BBC statistics are suggesting that their iPlayer and online streaming helped drive UK figures past the 34 million mark (reports had also surfaced that the BBC streams crashed on Friday due to an overload of viewers attempting to access coverage).

This figure might also be leaving out the official and unofficial viewing parties that took place throughout the country, as much of the British Commonwealth celebrated a national holiday to commemorate the event.

Statistics are suggesting that the UK viewing preferences are as originally expected, though, with an overwhelming majority choosing BBC1 for their coverage, with the Huw Edwards-fronted run beating main rival ITV1 with a peak of 19.3 million viewers, three times more than ITV (who were running a commercial-free broadcast for the event) could manage (but it was better than the anticipated five-fold ratings victory for the BBC).

Sky News was by and far the smallest of the three local host networks, with only 661,000 tuning into the cable and satellite channel. Sky’s TV broadcasting was even surpassed by YouTube, who counted over 1.3m global viewers on ‘The Royal Channel’ for live streaming.

For live American coverage, The Nielsen Company states that 22.7m was the average figure for a country which featured many different networks involved, with the number still fairly impressive considering the US audience (who generally would have no direct interest in a Royal Wedding) would have been up quite earlier than usual to tune in. Indian ratings authority aMap have also come in with their official number, seeing 42.1m watch live, while early estimates from Australia give another 4m there.

Although other countries have not yet pitched in their numbers (some densely-populated nations such as Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Indonesia do not have a ratings system), there is belief that unofficial coverage, online viewing, and unique viewers for re-runs and highlights could take the figure closer to the original lofty estimate of 2 billion global viewers, but still not anywhere near to the target.

A BBC anaylist said of this realisation: “It’s absurd to think that one-third of the world’s population watched the Royal Wedding. Most people around the world were asleep. If you think about it for a moment, it’s nonsense.”

While remaining figures from both major and minor markets are yet to filter through, it could yet be that 2 billion unique viewers saw the event in some form, but it is looking fairly unlikely. Regardless of their extravagent goals, though, can the TV producers of the Royal Wedding see their coverage as an overall success?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 7:43 am and is filed under TV Shows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.