The combination of Tiger Woods and St. Andrews helped the British Open to its top opening round audience in seven years.
Thursday’s nine hours of British Open coverage on USA Network averaged 1.14 million viewers, marking the tournament’s largest opening round audience since 2015 — the previous edition to take place from St. Andrews and the final one to air on ESPN (1.20M). Keep in mind that opening round coverage aired on Golf Channel in the intervening years.
Including additional streaming viewership not tracked by Nielsen, viewership jumped 28% from last year and 15% from 2019.
This year also marked the first time since 2019 that Tiger Woods played the Open, having missed last year’s tournament recovering from a car accident. There was no British Open two years ago.
The British Open averaged more viewers on Thursday than any round of last month’s U.S. Open on USA Network, comfortably surpassing the opening round audience of 833,000. Keep in mind that figure does not include three hours of coverage on the NBC broadcast network.
Viewership was no match for the first round of the PGA Championship on ESPN, which averaged 1.47 million in May — the highest opening round audience for that tournament in 20 years.
Due to the British Open, live coverage of the Tour de France aired exclusively on Peacock Thursday. The Open was a substantially stronger draw than the previous morning’s Tour de France coverage on USA, which averaged 369,000. Aided by the British Open lead-in, encore coverage of the Tour de France averaged 510,000 Thursday afternoon.
[Nielsen estimates from NBC Sports, ShowBuzz Daily 7.15]
