Sunday, June 3, 2007

Stanley Cup Ratings Down 33%

When will the owners wise up and fire their puppet? From embarrassingly admitting that hockey has become a niche sport to making excuses for poor television ratings, Gary Bettman has done his best to cover his muddy tracks. File this one under "Television Excuses."
The Stanley Cup finals lost nearly a quarter of what already was a small television audience. Anaheim's 1-0 victory over Ottawa in Game 2 on Wednesday night got a 0.6 cable rating on Versus and was watched in 446,000 homes in the United States. Versus is owned by Comcast Corp. (nasdaq: CMCSA - news - people )

The rating was down 33 percent from last year's second game, a 5-0 victory for Carolina over Edmonton, which received a 0.9 cable rating (600,000 homes) on OLN, as the same network was known then.

Through two games, the Stanley Cup finals averaged a 0.7 rating, down 22 percent from last year's 0.9, and households are down 20 percent, to 485,000 from 606,000 last year.
While the owners continue to be satisfied wth short-term successes, they will never fully realize the potential this great game has with Bettman at the helm.

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1 comment:

FAUX RUMORS said...

1) When we took math 33% of zero is still zero, right? LOL
2) Seriously, just when you think ratings couldn't get any lower! There are far more households which get the silly network now, so the ratings at least should be the same.
3) The fact that they are SIGNIFICANTLY worse does NOT bode well long term. However, Versus will have to continue to pay out the same cash for the 10 viewers for the next few years. Think ESPN is second guessing its decision? No way!