CBS Wins Weekly Ratings Race Thanks to Super Bowl
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Christian Petersen/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — It’s not difficult to guess which primetime program had the highest ratings for the week ending Sunday.
“Sunday” is the key word there, as in, “Super Bowl Sunday.” As previously announced, CBS’ broadcast of the Baltimore Ravens’ victory over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl 47 drew an audience of 108.7 million viewers.
The number is slightly inflated by the fact that Nielsen excluded the 34 minutes during which the game was delayed because of a power outage. Not that many people switched the channel during the outage — Nielsen estimates that 106.56 million were tuned in to CBS at the time of the third-quarter incident.
CBS announced on Wednesday that three million people watched the Super Bowl online, an increase of 900,000 from last year.
Including the Super Bowl and the power outage, CBS had eight of the top 10 primetime programs for the week. As a result, it easily won the network ratings race, ahead of Fox, ABC, NBC, Univision, the CW, ION Television and Telemundo.
Here are the top 10 primetime programs for the week of Jan. 28-Feb. 3, according to the Nielsen Company:
1. Super Bowl XLVII: Baltimore vs. San Francisco, CBS, 108.69 million.
2. Super Bowl Power Outage, CBS, 106.56 million.
3. NCIS, CBS, 22.07 million.
4. The Big Bang Theory, CBS, 17.76 million.
5. NCIS: Los Angeles, CBS, 17.3 million.
6. American Idol (Wednesday), Fox, 15.78 million.
7. Person of Interest, CBS, 15.71 million.
8. American Idol (Thursday), Fox, 13.8 million.
9. Two and a Half Men, CBS, 13.7 million.
10. Blue Bloods, CBS, 11.5 million.
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