{"id":385181,"date":"2026-01-01T18:05:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T18:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/385181\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T18:05:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T18:05:09","slug":"nba-christmas-day-viewership-hits-15-year-high-with-47m-tuning-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/385181\/","title":{"rendered":"NBA Christmas Day viewership hits 15-year high with 47M tuning in"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The NBA saw its best Christmas Day viewership numbers in 15 years, the league announced Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>More than 47 million people in the U.S. watched at least some of the five-game slate on ABC and ESPN, which represents a 45% increase over last year. And there was an average of 5.5 million viewers for the games, up 4% from a year ago.<\/p>\n<p>The Cleveland-New York game was the most-watched Christmas game ever that started at noon Eastern, with an average of 6.4 million viewers. The San Antonio-Oklahoma City game was the most-watched in the 2:30 p.m. Christmas timeslot since 2017 and the Dallas-Golden State game was the most-watched in the 5 p.m. timeslot on the holiday since 2019.<\/p>\n<p>Nielsen said it provided the ratings data.<\/p>\n<p>Also Wednesday, the NBA said it was the \u201cmost-viewed brand across social media\u201d on Christmas, with its content generating 1.6 billion views, according to Videocites. That\u2019s up 23% over Christmas 2024.<\/p>\n<p>___<\/p>\n<p>AP NBA: <a class=\"Link AnClick-LinkEnhancement\" data-gtm-enhancement-style=\"LinkEnhancementA\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/nba\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/NBA<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The NBA saw its best Christmas Day viewership numbers in 15 years, the league&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,5503,6115,2276,206863,134,482,31401,168181,10109,590,31647,1025,1026,5673,12837,85,488],"class_list":["post-385181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-christmas","tag-cleveland","tag-connecticut","tag-ct-state-wire","tag-entertainment","tag-general-news","tag-holidays","tag-local-news-for-apple","tag-national-basketball-association","tag-nba","tag-nba-basketball","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-oklahoma-city","tag-san-antonio","tag-sports","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}