Originally Posted by mlt11:
“The Sat 3pm Aviva game continuing to go from strength to strength - in my view this is by far the biggest success story of BTS so far.
However quite interesting that the South Africa v New Zealand rugby international on Sky Sports 4 at exactly the same time (ie Sat 3pm) outrated it with 197,000.
This, together with the good Sky ratings for Championship rugby, suggests few rugby fans have cancelled their Sky Sports subs - I suspect vast majority of people watching rugby on BTS are people who also have SS or people signing up to BTS who have never had SS.
Of course in due course we'll get Sky's ratings for Heineken Cup (and then November internationals) and will be able to do comparison re prior year.”
Bit late following up on this - we now have Sky's ratings for the first week of this season's Heineken Cup:
2013 Heineken Cup week 1:
LIVE RUGBY-HARLEQUINS V SCARLETS (SAT 1534) 242
LIVE RUGBY-EXETER V CARDIFF (SUN 1232) 190
LIVE RUGBY-OSPREYS V LEINSTER (SAT 1743) 157
LIVE RUGBY-TOULON V GLASGOW (SUN 1448) 137
LIVE RUGBY-EDINBURGH V MUNSTER (SAT 1300) 90
2012 Heineken Cup week 1:
LIVE EUROPEAN RUGBY (SUN 1447) 178
LIVE EUROPEAN RUGBY (SAT 1742) 171
LIVE EUROPEAN RUGBY (SUN 1304) 151
LIVE EUROPEAN RUGBY (SAT 1534) 148
LIVE EUROPEAN RUGBY (SUN 1930) 47
LIVE EUROPEAN RUGBY (FRI 1930) 43
So no evidence of rugby union fans cancelling Sky Sports subs - 2013 ratings are slightly up overall on 2012.