ESPN has had one of its most-viewed starts to the NBA regular season since it started to carry games in 2002.<\/p>\n
According to the network and Nielsen, ESPN averaged 2.6 million viewers in its first 21 games through Christmas, a 35% increase from last season and the second-most-watched in a full season. The numbers for this season trail only 2010-11.<\/p>\n
The NBA announced last week that more than 47 million people in the U.S. watched at least some of the five-game Christmas slate on ABC and ESPN, which represents a 45% increase over last year. There was an average of 5.5 million viewers for the games, up 4% from a year ago.<\/p>\n
Viewership overall this season is up 47% among women and 37% among Hispanic audiences. This is the first year of the NBA’s 11-year media rights deal with ESPN, NBC and Prime Video.<\/p>\n
ESPN’s NBA studio shows have also experienced increased viewership. “Inside the NBA” is averaging 1.2 million in its first season on ESPN, up 135% compared to last year’s regular-season average on TNT. The Christmas Day edition averaged 5.1 million, the show’s most-watched regular season audience.<\/p>\n
“NBA Today,” ESPN’s weekday studio show, is averaging 361,000, a 26% increase from this time last year.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ESPN has had one of its most-viewed starts to the NBA regular season since it started to carry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-400478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400478","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=400478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}