Fox Sports 1 earned its largest-ever MLB regular season audience. In other news, the NHL’s West final hit a series-high despite a big decline, and TNT’s The Dunk King premiered with a series-low.
FS1 Hits MLB High
- Thursday’s Yankees-Royals Major League Baseball game earned 909,000 viewers on Fox Sports 1, the network’s largest regular season MLB audience ever (dates back to 2014). The previous high was 901,000 for Yankees-Indians in July of last year. Regardless of network, it was the third-most watched weeknight game this season behind the Cubs home opener on April 10 (1.8M) and Indians-Rangers on Opening Day (1.1M), both on ESPN. In other action, ESPN scored 601,000 for Wednesday’s Red Sox-Cardinals marathon, up 6% form Nationals-Mets last year (569K) and up 12% from Rangers-Red Sox in 2015 (537K).
Big Drop, With Big Caveat, For Ducks-Predators Game 4
- Thursday’s Ducks-Predators NHL Western Conference final Game 4 had 1.3 million viewers on NBCSN, down 42% from Blues-Sharks (2.3M) and down 53% from Ducks-Blackhawks in 2015 (2.8M), with the caveat that both of those games aired on the NBC broadcast network. Last year’s game had a direct lead-in from The Preakness Stakes. The Ducks’ overtime win was the most-watched game of the series.
Dunk King Hits Low in Premiere
- The season premiere of TNT’s The Dunk King earned 1.5 million viewers following Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals Wednesday night, the least-watched episode of the second-year series (five telecasts). Viewership fell 20% from last year’s series premiere (1.9M), which had a stronger lead-in from Inside the NBA (4.1M, compared to 2.6M) and Game 1 of conference finals (8.7M, compared to 6.4M).
UPDATE 7/11/17: The previous record for FS1 was 901,000 for a Yankees-Indians game last year.
