ITV News Scores With Champions League Football

ITV News Channel has achieved its highest audience yet with the Roma vs. Arsenal football match, which achieved peak audiences of over 1 million last night.

The match provided the recently launched channel with a 8.96% audience share in the 7.45 to 9.30pm viewing slot. It also helped the news channel to its highest recorded audience share across all hours (2.03%).

Last night’s other big match, Newcastle vs. Juventus, which was broadcast on ITV2, drew an average of 1.2 million viewers, giving the channel a 11.13% audience share. The game reached a peak audience of 1.59 million, a 13.78% share, making it the sixth most popular match shown on ITV2 this season.

According to ITV, the matches made ITV2 and the ITV News Channel the first and third most popular non-terrestrial stations to be shown in multi-channel homes across the day.

The audience figures will provide comfort to ITV executives who recently admitted they over-valued football rights and paid too much for the Premier League highlights. According to analysts at Deutsche Bank, the highlights, presented by Des Lynam in The Premiership on Saturday nights, lose ITV around £750,000 per week, so the audience’s gain is the shareholder’s loss.

ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com

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