NHL viewership has rebounded after a decline last season, and both ESPN\/ABC and TNT\/truTV head toward the Winter Olympics with gains to date. ESPN\/ABC is averaging 648,000 viewers to date (18 games), up 31%. Games on ESPN cable alone (16 games) are averaging 569,000, up 39%. Meanwhile, TNT\/truTV is averaging 340,000 viewers after 43 games, which is up 2% from the same point during the 2024-25 season. TNT\u2019s pregame coverage also is up 45% year-over-year.<\/p>\n
College basketball viewership continues to rise, even as the sport has had to fight with football for eyeballs. ESPN networks are up 18% to date (ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU). ESPN on its own is averaging 830,000 viewers, which is up 7% from the same point last season. On Monday, the network carried Arizona-BYU (1.8 million) and Louisville-Duke (1.7 million), and those are the two best Monday men\u2019s hopes games on any network in seven years (also the the third- and fifth-best ESPN college hoops audiences this season to date). Meanwhile, Fox Sports is also seeing growth around college hoops. The broadcast network is averaging 1.37 million viewers, up 71%. FS1 is averaging 231,000 viewers, up 34%. Over on Fox-controlled Big Ten Network, men\u2019s hoops is up 50% to an average of 171,000.<\/p>\n
On the women\u2019s college basketball side, ESPN networks are up 41% from last season, with ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU each seeing gains. ESPN\u2019s Sunday women\u2019s hoops games alone are up 16%, when many of the matches have gone up against NFL coverage. Last Thursday night\u2019s South Carolina-Oklahoma game on ESPN drew 777,000 viewers, which is ESPN\u2019s second-best WBB game this season and fourth-best across all networks this season. <\/p>\n
The Spurs are the most popular team on NBA League Pass in France this season with C Victor Wembanyama on the squad. The Spurs also rank in the top 5 in several European markets, including Belgium, Finland, Poland and Turkey. New League Pass subscribers in France are also up 54% year-over-year. The Spurs-Nets game on Ovt. 26 was the most-viewed regular-season game in France on League Pass in two years.<\/p>\n
The chart below lists select viewership figures for recent sports telecasts.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NHL viewership has rebounded after a decline last season, and both ESPN\/ABC and TNT\/truTV head toward the Winter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[53467,30121,19976,53468,266,30864,5,4,1831],"class_list":["post-434690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-audience-analysis","tag-college-basketball","tag-data-and-insights","tag-data-sets","tag-espn","tag-fox-sports","tag-hockey","tag-nhl","tag-tnt-sports"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/115979826327088150","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}