Royal wedding draws 1.3m Irish viewers

Nearly 1.3 million Irish viewers watched the royal wedding last Friday - a huge audience for a daytime event in this country.

Nearly 1.3 million Irish viewers watched the royal wedding last Friday - a huge audience for a daytime event in this country.

The figures measure those who would have tuned in to some aspect of the coverage on the five channels showing the event: RTÉ, TV3, BBC, ITV and Sky News or those who watched on a personal video recorder such as Sky+ or Digital+ on the same day.

Collectively 1.29 million people watched some aspect of the coverage between 10.30am and 1.30pm, but an average of 758,000 people stayed with the event throughout.

The ratings winner was TV3 where an average of 262,800 viewers watched the station's coverage from 10.30pm to 1.30pm, most of which was a simulcast of ITV's coverage.

Next was RTÉ at 196,700 viewers followed closely by BBC1 which had 184,300 viewers.

A total of 61,400 tuned into UTV while only 52,800 watched the wedding on Sky News despite the station's dawn to dusk coverage.

Nearly 500,000 Irish viewers watched at the peak time just after the wedding started at 11am.

The peak figure for TV3 was 294,000 viewers at 11.04am just as the bride Kate Middleton was getting ready to walk down the aisle.

RTÉ's coverage peaked well after the wedding was finished when 248,000 tuned at 12.43pm.

A total of 792,000 watched some aspect of TV3's royal wedding coverage between 8.30am and 1.30pm.

TV3 head of programming Ben Frow said the decision to show five hours of live and uninterrupted coverage of the royal wedding was vindicated by the audience figures.

"I never thought it would do nearly that well. It's eight times more than I expected. I thought we'd be doing well to get between 30,000 and 40,000 viewers," he said.

Ronan McGreevy

Ronan McGreevy

Ronan McGreevy is a news reporter with The Irish Times