More than a quarter of Saturday’s Final Four viewers watched the games on TNT, explaining much of the confusion over Turner Sports’ “Teamcast” coverage.
The Kentucky-oriented “Teamcast” of Saturday’s Kentucky/Wisconsin Final Four game earned 4.3 million viewers on TNT, making up 26% of the total audience. The Wisconsin version on TruTV earned 1.6 million viewers, and the neutral broadcast on TBS had 10.4 million.
Earlier in the night, TNT’s Florida “Teamcast” of the Connecticut/Florida game earned 3.7 million viewers — equaling 32% of the audience. The Connecticut version on TruTV had just 851,000 viewers, and the TBS telecast drew 7.1 million.
The disproportionately large audience for TNT indicates that perhaps millions of viewers mistakenly tuned into the network for the traditional broadcast. It may also be the case that Florida and Kentucky are just much more popular than Connecticut and Wisconsin, but even that would not account for such a large gap between the TNT and TruTV telecasts.
As noted previously, there were numerous complaints about bias on the “Teamcasts” by viewers who were unaware they were watching a team-specific telecast.
(Sat. numbers from TV By the Numbers, twitter.com/ourand_sbj [1], [2])
