The nearly 80,000 attendees at Mile High Stadium for Barack Obama’s historic speech was nothing compared to the TV audience.
The audience climbed to a peak on Thursday, topping that for the Olympics opening ceremonies. Nielsen reports 38.3 million viewers watched Obama’s DNC finale, cumulatively on ten networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo. Coverage varied by network, all ten aired live coverage from approximately 10-11PM (ET).
Some 7.5 million were African-Americans.
NBC won each of the four nights of the convention coverage with an average 6.27 million viewers Thursday night, up 809,000 viewers from Wednesday. The figure also was an increase of 920,000 viewers from the Democrats’ closing night four years ago on July 29, when Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was the candidate.
ABC averaged 5.73 million viewers, up 2.25 million from Wednesday.
CBS averaged 4.46 million viewers, up 920,000 from Wednesday.
Thursday’s speech bested its closest competitor, day four of the 1992 DNC, by more than 10 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. Nielsen first started tracking convention data in 1960.
Across four days of coverage, an average of 22.5 million households tuned in, according to preliminary data from Nielsen, beating the previous convention high of the 1976 Republican National Convention, which averaged 21.9 million homes.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
