I'm not sure where it started, but a wide range of newspapers and broadcasters have fallen for the line that one billion viewers will be watching today's cricket match between India and Pakistan.
Let's de-construct it a few ways. The population of India is 1.3 billion; let's put Pakistan at 200 million. There's 1.5 billion. Major sporting events often transfix whole countries, but even then the tv audience is way less than half the population - when it's on free-to-air tv. And cricket is accessed by subscription only in most countries. In the UK, it's a Sky deal, or a NOW pass, to watch today. So far, live audiences haven't exceed 1m. In India, you have to sign up to Star Sports 1 or Hotstar.com (available in the UK for £11.99 a month); in Pakistan, it's on Ten Sports and SonyLiv.
Does the rest of the world have the hots for this sport ? The USA ? Europe ? South America ? The International Cricket Council last year claimed that there were 1 billion cricket fans worldwide. That they'll all be watching is more than unlikely.
The biggest tv event of recent years was the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games, which was forecast by some pundits to reach 2 billion, and may have actually reached 1 billion.
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Thanks for this note of sanity Bill. I have a file marked b**l*o*ks where I keep this stuff. It goes back many years. I once, when I did the job of global measurement for the BBC, manage to get the newsroom, at least at Bush House, never to put out any claims for global audience figures, unless they were based on real research. They actually never are, although one of the major sponsorship agencies does do research after the events to find out what the actual figures were. It is not easy when so many nati0onal TV audiences are rarely if ever measured. Now that India has a nationwide and reliable audience measurement system, and China has the beginnings of one, it is possible to calculate at least some of the world's audience activity in relation to TV. The metrics for the Internet can also be taken account of. But all of this has to be done AFTER the event. By the way, you are right about the Beijing Olympics. It probably reached a little bit less than 1 billion viewers and is therefore still the largest global TV audience ever. Nearly 30 years ago I did global calculations for the 1990 Wembley concert for Mandela and the Eurovision Song Contest. 1 billion was the claim for Mandela and 500 million for Eurovision. The figures I calculated based on audience measurement and some projections for countries where no measurement was done, were 57 million (Mandela concert) and 123 million (Eurovision)
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