The National League Championship Series was a boon to Fox Sports 1 despite tying a record low.
The five-game Giants/Cardinals NLCS averaged a 2.8 rating and 4.5 million viewers on FOX and Fox Sports 1, down 43% in ratings and 42% in viewership from last year’s six-game Red Sox/Tigers ALCS (4.9, 7.7M) and down 30% and 31%, respectively, from the seven-game Giants/Cardinals series in 2012 (4.0, 6.5M). Last year’s Cardinals/Dodgers ALCS on TBS averaged a 3.2 and 5.0 million.
Giants/Cardinals tied the lowest average rating in LCS history, no surprise given that it was the first to air on the relatively new Fox Sports 1. The only other LCS to average a rating as low — Rockies/Diamondbacks in 2007 — was the first to air on TBS.
Keep in mind TBS was, and still is, one of the most distributed cable channels. By contrast, FS1 is currently in 85 million homes according to Sports Business Daily — 15 million fewer than TBS and over 30 million fewer than the FOX broadcast network.
While the NLCS tied a record low, it set several record highs for Fox Sports 1. The series delivered the three largest audiences in the history of FS1 or predecessor Speed Channel, topped by 5.0 million for Game 4. The channel attracted a peak audience of 6.5 million viewers during the final 14 minutes of Game 5, a rather large sampling for a network more used to hundreds of thousands.
Including the Division Series, the MLB Postseason generated seven of the ten largest audiences on FS1 since it rebranded from Speed last year.
(Numbers from MLB, Fox Sports)
