powered by FreeFind

Apple iTunes

Archives

Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Fri.-Sun., Aug. 23-25) -- Cowboys bulk up (updated with Breaking Bad numbers)

By ED BARK
@unclebarkycom
The Dallas Cowboys’ home win against Cincinnati Saturday night in Game 4 of the pre-season put on some ratings weight compared to the last two.

A 24-18 win on CBS11 averaged 447,473 total viewers, a nice bounce from the 347,653 who watched the previous Saturday afternoon’s road loss at Arizona. The so-called “dress rehearsal” game fell well short of the 695,304 viewers for this summer’s pre-season opener against Miami on NBC. But it drew in excess of 100,000 more viewers than last year’s Game 4 of the pre-season, which had 338,705 opposite a portion of the Republican National Convention.

The 2012 Game 4, also against Miami, wasn’t the dress rehearsal, though. The Cowboys mostly played their reserves in the final tune-up before the regular season. Because of the Hall of Fame game, Dallas is playing five pre-season contests this summer. This Thursday’s finale, at home against Houston on CBS11, will be dominated by second- third- and 25th-stringers.

Playing opposite the Cowboys Saturday night on Fox Sports Southwest, the first-place Texas Rangers’ 3-2 loss to the White Sox drew a decent-sized 165,221 viewers.

Sunday afternoon’s Rangers loss got less attention with 123,916 viewers.

AMC’s new 8 p.m. Sunday episode of Breaking Bad held strong with 178,989 total viewers and 133,955 in the advertiser-prized 18-to-49 demographic. That’s a super-sized percentage. The network’s following Low Winter Sun then bottomed out again with respective totals of 20,653 and 12,758 viewers.

The Friday night Rangers rout of the White Sox had the team’s strongest numbers of the weekend, averaging 234,063 viewers on TXA21. That was good enough to beat the competing Green Bay Packers-Seattle Seahawks pre-season game on CBS, which ranked No. 2 for the night with 151,452 viewers. Both CBS11 and TXA21 are still being blacked out in D-FW by Time Warner cable in its ongoing dispute with the CBS network. The shutdown affects roughly 400,000 subscribers in this viewing area.

Here are Friday’s local news derby results:

WFAA8 swept the 10 p.m. Nielsens in both total viewers and 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming. Fox4 did likewise at 6 a.m.

CBS11 had the most total viewers at both 5 and 6 p.m. while WFAA8 was tops those hours with 25-to-54-year-olds.

Email comments or questions to: unclebarky@verizon.net