CTV announced yesterday that its Sunday night Super Bowl broadcast drew the largest Canadian audience in the game’s history.
Citing preliminary figures from BBM Nielsen Media Research, the network reports that an average of 5.07 million Canadians tuned in to the game on either CTV or its French-language sports station, RDS. CTV accounted for an average of 4.16 million viewers, a 24% increase over Global Television’s numbers from last year, while RDS viewership jumped 13% to 905,000.
The previous record for Canadian Super Bowl viewers was established in 2006, when an average of 4.98 million people watched the game on Global and RDS.
Audience numbers on CTV alone peaked at 5.83 million in the latter moments of Sunday’s game, with 10.7 million people watching at least a portion of the contest.
CTV said ad space for the game was sold out, though to stay in sync with the U.S. broadcast and adhere to CRTC regulations restricting Canadian broadcasters to 14 minutes of advertising per hour—versus the unlimited commercial time for U.S. broadcasters—in most breaks CTV also ran promotional spots for upcoming shows including Dexter and Jericho.
