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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Tues., Aug. 9) -- biggest boom yet for Rio Games

By ED BARK
@unclebarkycom on Twitter
Paced by live coverage of swimmer Michael Phelps’ 20th and 21st gold medals, Night 5 of NBC’s Summer Olympics from Rio neared an average of one million D-FW viewers while again surpassing the same night’s coverage from the 2012 Games in London.

Running from 7 to 11:04 p.m., the Olympics pulled in 970,289 viewers in easily outdrawing the 860,311 for Night 5 the last time around. A peak crowd of 1,229,368 watched from 8:30 to 8:45 p.m. Nielsen Media Research measures in 15-minute increments. And in seven of those quarter hours, the Olympics exceeded the one million viewers mark. The final full quarter hour -- 10:45 to 11 p.m. -- drew the fewest viewers with 743,652.

Nights 3 through 5 of the Summer Games have now all outdrawn their 2012 counterparts after Friday’s Opening Ceremony laid something of a ratings egg compared to the 2012 festivities from London. This year’s big chunks of live swimming, with Phelps stirring the drink, so far have given NBC a belated super liftoff in 2016 after the Friday and Saturday night ratings ran behind the first two nights in 2012.

Rival broadcast networks took a crushing, with CBS’ 7 p.m. repeat of NCIS ranking as Tuesday’s second biggest draw in prime-time with just 127,483 viewers.

Here are Tuesday’s local news derby results.

CBS11 had the most total viewers at 10 p.m. in a down-sized three-way race while Fox4 took the top spot with 25-to-54-year-olds (main advertiser target audience for news programming). Provided with “hashmarks” (no measurable audience) for ABC’s 9:30 p.m. lead-in -- a rerun of Fresh Off the Boat, TEGNA8 possibly sank to its lowest total of 25-to-54-year-olds ever. The station drew just 5,953 viewers in this age range, compared to No. 1 Fox4’s 62,502.

Fox4 also won in total viewers at 6 a.m., but was beaten by NBC5 among 25-to-54-year-olds. The Peacock again dominated at 5 and 6 p.m. with sweeps in both time slots.

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