{"id":789553,"date":"2026-07-09T16:37:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T16:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/789553\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T16:37:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T16:37:16","slug":"state-of-origin-game-iii-the-highest-rating-program-in-series-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/789553\/","title":{"rendered":"State of Origin Game III the highest-rating program in series history"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2026 State of Origin decider was the highest-rating game in the television broadcast history of the interstate rugby league series.<\/p>\n

Days after the NRL inked a $5.3 billion broadcast deal \u2014 the most lucrative in Australian sporting history \u2014 broadcaster Channel Nine flagged that another record had been broken.<\/p>\n

A total audience of 4.29 million, calculated as the average number of people tuning in at any given time, watched NSW stun Queensland to reclaim the Origin shield on Wednesday night.<\/p>\n

Blues bash brothers unleash the beautiful crazy<\/a><\/p>\n

Liam Martin and Hudson Young don’t like to point fingers unless it comes time to decide which of the New South Wales backrowers is madder.<\/p>\n

The game edged out this year’s Origin II, which attracted 4.286 million viewers, to become the highest-rated fixture across 45 iterations of the three-match series.<\/p>\n

This year’s figure of 4.29 million represents a 9.2 per cent increase on the numbers from last year’s decider.<\/p>\n

In total, 6.032 million viewers watched for some part of the match.<\/p>\n

By total viewership numbers, the match was the highest-rating TV program of 2026, and the top program of the night in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.<\/p>\n

Some 1.685 million viewers streamed the match, a 70.9 per cent year-on-year increase from the corresponding game in 2025.<\/p>\n

AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2026 State of Origin decider was the highest-rating game in the television broadcast history of the interstate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64,63,38943,3925,30256,5845,23423,97739,8050,159,588,85,6405],"class_list":["post-789553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-average","tag-blues","tag-broadcast","tag-lang-park","tag-maroons","tag-reach","tag-record","tag-rugby-league","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-state-of-origin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789553","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=789553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}