By James Manning
SBS has all been about Eurovision over the weekend.
Semi Final 1 attracted an average metro audience of 500,000 on Friday night, peaking at 672,000 and an average regional audience of 161,000, peaking at 197,000, giving SBS a total average audience of 661,000 and a peak audience of 869,000 (metro plus regional).
On Saturday night the SBS broadcast of Semi Final 2 attracted a combined average metro and regional audience of 880,000 – a metro audience of 639,000, peaking at 755,000 and an average regional audience of 241,000, peaking at 319,000.
The Sunday night audience watching the Grand Final was actually smaller than the Saturday night crowd. However many more Eurovision fans were out of bed early on Sunday watching it unfold live. The live audience lasting the four hours was 263,000 with SBS Eurovision EP Paul Clarke and others in Guy Sebastian‘s green room entourage (including manager Titus Day) almost getting more screen time than the Aussie singer had with his three minutes.
The audience watching the replay of the Grand Final in primetime was 592,000.
Hosts Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang did a good job of keeping the gags flowing during the spots that needed filling, then backing away when they needed to.
The audiences for both Semi Finals were records for SBS. The audience watching the final last year was 476,000, with 581,000 in 2013.
Overall, the broadcaster’s coverage of the Eurovision grand final helped push its primary share to 11.1% last night.
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