NBA All-Star Game viewership increases from 2015

Turner Sports is happy over the numbers for this year’s NBA All-Star Game. On Sunday, the game which was simulcast on TBS and TNT averaged a viewership of 7.6 million viewers. That is up 6% from 2015’s game. And going up against the Walking Dead’s mid-season premiere on AMC, that is a pretty good number.

The game peaked with an average audience of 8.7 million during the 8:45 – 9 p.m. ET quarter-hour.

Turner was quick to point out that with this year’s All-Star Game in Toronto, the numbers still did well without registering the rating from Canadian city. No Canadian cities are measured in the U.S. Nielsen ratings and Turner notes that normally, a host city will register as one of the higher local markets as New York did last year:

This year marks the first time NBA All-Star was held outside the United States, with the host city of Toronto not reflected in Nielsen analytics. Traditionally, a host city of equivalent size to Toronto (a top five U.S. city) receives an approximate 50% increase in audience consumption for All-Star events on Saturday and Sunday. Last year’s NBA All-Star events were held in New York City, the top television market in the United States, which garnered record-setting audience consumption locally.

As far as the local markets are concerned, traditional NBA cities topped the list:

1. San Antonio (12.4)
2. Oklahoma City (9.9)
3. Cleveland (9.7)
4. San Francisco (9.4)
5. Memphis (8.4)

NBA All-Star Saturday Night which had the Skills competition including the Slam Dunk registered 5.6 million viewers and again, traditional NBA markets topped the local ratings:

1. Cleveland (6.7)
2. San Francisco (6.2)
3. New York (5.9)
4. Oklahoma City (5.6)
5. San Antonio (5.6)

Online, Turner said its TV Everywhere platforms where viewers could watch either through its Watch TBS and Watch TNT apps had triple-digit increases in minutes consumed (135%), unique visitors (235%) and live streams (112%).

Overall, Turner can hang its hat on the higher viewership numbers for this year’s NBA All-Star Game.

[Turner]