TORONTO and MONTREAL – It is clearly an understatement to say that Canadians love to watch hockey.
Wednesday night’s game seven matchup between Montreal and Pittsburgh drew an average audience of 4.239 million viewers for CBC, a broadcast that now ranks as the sixth largest Stanley Cup playoff audience in history on the network.
On-line, the game attracted 130,000 live streaming views, while game six between Vancouver and Chicago on May 11 received 80,249 streaming views. Overall, live streaming views totaled 762,000 for the second round of the NHL playoffs, an increase of 220% from 2009 (238,000). CBC recorded more than 1.5 million live streaming views to the 2010 Playoffs to date, an increase of 187% from 2009 (520,000).
RDS’ French language broadcast of the Montreal/Pittsburgh game 7 attracted a record average audience of 2.45 million viewers and a 58.5% share of the Quebec-Franco market, making it the highest audience ever recorded by the sports network.
