It’s good to have sports rights — it’s great if that investment results in instant classic, full-length championship series.
Fox just jumped from fourth to first in terms of fall season TV ratings rankings to-date, according to Nielsen’s “most current” metric, which counts one-week’s worth of delayed viewing where available. That’s thanks almost solely to the strong 2016 World Series and some NFL Sunday afternoon overruns. And yes, “Empire” still does very well for the network on Wednesdays.
Still, this is the first time Fox has been No. 1 in the fall in five years. Whether or not this will last is a whole other conversation, however. Fortunately, Fox will get another huge boost from Super Bowl LI in February — the big game is always the largest telecast of the year.
For now, here are the broadcast rankings to-date:
1. Fox: 2.8 rating/10 share (That’s +17 percent from this point last year)
2. NBC: 2.6/9 (-10 percent)
3. CBS: 2.2/8 (-19 percent)
4. ABC: 2.0/7 (-17 percent)
And here is how the 2016-2017 season started. Finally, click here to see how the top series from that week did after three days worth of delayed viewing.
In terms of just live viewing, which obviously accounts for the vast majority of sports tune-in, Fox’s World Series Game 7 alone scored north of 40 million total viewers — that’s the most for any baseball game in 25 years.