Unsurprisingly, Nine dominated the weekend with the 2012 London Olympic Games as 1.75 million viewers tuned in to the live coverage of the opening ceremony.
Despite the 5:30am starting time, 1.75 million metro viewers watched the opening ceremony live in the wee hours of Saturday morning, according to OzTam figures. It peaked at 2.66 million viewers by the time the telecast wrapped up at 9:30am. Nationally, the spectacle commanded an average of 2.46 million people. A replay at 2pm attracted 1.31 million metro viewers.
However, the 2004 Athens Olympics, which was in a similar time zone, saw 2.3 million metro viewers tuned in while the 2008 Beijing games had 2.8 million viewers.
The rest of Saturday's coverage of the Olympics earned Nine 48.0% audience share across the day, with Seven its nearest rival at 12.3%.
On Sunday, the games continued to garner the lion's share of viewers with the early evening coverage the most-watched program of the day with an average of 2.14 million metro viewers while its evening segment took in 1.91 million viewers. Nine had previously estimated its evening coverage would average 1.85 million viewers. Traditionally, ratings for the Olympics drop off slightly in the second week.
Nine's Olympics coverage took seven positions in the top 20 of the rankings ladder yesterday.
Elsewhere, MasterChef All Stars was the highest-rating non-Olympics, non-news or current affairs program in seventh with 752,000 viewers tuned in.
A double episode of Seven's US drama Once Upon A Time rated 711,000 and 623,000 viewers respectively.
Other programs in the top 20 on Sunday were Nine News, Seven News, Sunday Night (Seven), ABC News, Grand Designs Revisited (ABC), Dream Build (ABC), Birdsong (ABC), The Sunday Footy Show (Nine), NRL (Nine) and Ten News.
On Sunday, across the main channels, Nine won the night with 41.9% of audience share, followed by Seven with 17.2%, Ten with 11.2%, the ABC with 9.3% and SBS had 4.3%.
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