ESPN Tennis Ratings Surged with Live Wimbledon Coverage

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ESPN Tennis Ratings Surged with Live Wimbledon Coverage

By Chris Oddo

Photo Credit: ESPN

(July 9, 2012) -- ESPN saw its Wimbledon ratings improve drastically in its first year of an exclusive, all-live 12-year agreement with the All England Club.

ESPN, home to all four Grand Slams in the U.S., televised over 140 hours of live tennis, with an additional 800 broadcast on ESPN3.

The new, all-live and all-ESPN broadcasted Wimbledon concluded with the network's best tennis rating in history for yesterday's men's final between Roger Federer and Andy Murray, a 2.9 coverage rating with an average of 2.876 million households tuning in during the final.

The ratings for Sunday's final peaked at a 4.1 for the half hour starting at 1 P.M. Eastern, another ESPN record for tennis.

The network posted its top five most-watched Wimbledon telecasts in its 10 years of covering the event.

The household audience for five telecasts in 2012 top any previous ESPN/ESPN2 Wimbledon telecast going back to when ESPN networks began televising the event in 2003. The previous best had been an average of 971,000 homes for the 2007 Ladies’ Quarterfinals on ESPN2 on July 4, 2007 (based a 1.0 rating).

On the digital front, consumption of ESPN's digital platforms nearly tripled from last year.

ESPN3/WatchESPN registered 126 million live minutes of viewing across platforms, up 182 percent from 2011.

Nearly 23.6 million live minutes were consumed during yesterday's final.

For decades, NBC's tape-delayed coverage of late-rounds of The Championships irked die-hard tennis fans, who vehemently let their outrage be known. Sensing that live coverage was the key to reaching an increasingly younger and more media-savvy audience, Wimbledon elected to end its 43-year partnership with NBC to give ESPN the nod.

"Given the expanded nature of social media, the immediate need of fans, and the importance of the here and now, it is very difficult to ever imagine how we could take a world-class event and deliver it on tape," said Jason Bernstein, ESPN's Senior Director of Programming and Acquisitions in a conference call before this year's Wimbledon.