Setanta Sports Pulls In Over 1.5m Viewers For England Victory

A peak of around 1.6 million viewers tuned in to see England beat Croatia 4-1 on Setanta Sports 1 last night.

The subscriber-only sports channel attracted an average audience of just under 1.4 million viewers between 8pm and 10pm, an improvement on the figures for Saturday’s England match shown on the channel (see 887,000 Tune In For England v Andorra On Setanta).

Setanta failed to reach an agreement with ITV to show the highlights of the match, with reports claiming that it turned down a £500,000 bid from the free to air broadcaster yesterday.

However, Setanta tried to appease England fans by announcing late yesterday afternoon that it would show unencrypted highlights of the match at 11.30pm.

The highlights picked up an average audience of 222,000 viewers, peaking at 302,000.

Elsewhere, BBC One attracted nearly 7 million viewers to Ainsley Harriott’s Who Do You Think You Are? programme.

An average audience of 6.3 million viewers tuned in to see the television presenter go to the Caribben to trace his ancestry, which secured the channel a 28.5% audience share between 9pm and 10pm.

ITV1’s Lost in Austen pulled in just over 3 million viewers, while The 9/11 Hotel programme on Channel 4 attracted 2.6 million at the same time.

Overnight data is available each morning in mediatel.co.uk’s TV Database, with all BARB registered subscribers able to view reports for terrestrial networks and key multi-channel stations.

BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk Channel Four: 020 7396 4444 www.channel4.com ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com