With an audience of over 81.8 million worldwide, it was the most watched television show on the globe and far surpassed the viewership figures of the leading TV dramas the previous two years (CSI and CSI: Miami).
A result is that the networks are expanding their reality plans, particularly as the ratings for some strike fare like "American Gladiators" are surpassing the viewership for the scripted shows they replaced.
According to Nielsen ratings, "The F Word" was seen by 1.99 million households among viewers aged between 18 and 49, making it the highest rated episode of the season, and surpassing the viewership of the NBC primetime comedy talk show, The Jay Leno Show.
Twitch's peak viewership rivals, and has surpassed, the average prime-time viewership of some cable networks, with 75% of Twitch's viewers falling into the advertiser-coveted 18-49 agroupoup.
Total per-episode viewership has surpassed a staggering 25 million, making it the most popular HBO show ever.
Though TiVo users are hardly a representative sample if you want to look at usage data of your average TV viewer in the United States, the findings are remarkable and suggest that the consumption of recorded TV and Internet-delivered programming is surpassing live TV viewership much more rapidly than anticipated.
That game was the most-viewed U.S. soccer match of all time with 18.2 million viewers on average watching on ESPN, with the record viewership surpassing the previous high of 17.9 million viewers for the 1999 Women's World Cup final (USA vs. China) on ABC.
For the night "The Walking Dead" had the largest overall audience, with viewership that slightly surpassed this season's premiere total of 12.3 million.
It was not even an elimination game, yet viewership in both countries surpassed that of Game 7 of last spring's Stanley Cup finals, which was carried in the United States on the regular NBC network.
(Viewership for the first debate surpassed the same event in 2008 by 28 percent, suggesting that even though we've been told everyone has already made up their minds, many chose to see for themselves).
With an audience of over 300 million people, viewership of streaming sites like Amazon's Twitch have surpassed popular news sources such as CNN, and according to one study, more unique viewers watched "Gaming video content" than HBO, Netflix, ESPN and Hulu combined in 2017.
