{"id":261427,"date":"2025-11-04T16:40:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T16:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/261427\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T16:40:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T16:40:07","slug":"world-series-game-7-adds-record-canadian-viewership-to-fox-impressive-total","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/261427\/","title":{"rendered":"World Series Game 7 adds record Canadian viewership to Fox\u2019 impressive total"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sportsnet averaged 10.9 million viewers for Game 7 of the Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series, the best English-language, non-Olympic broadcast on record in Canada, according to SBJ\u2019s Austin Karp. Only the 2010 Vancouver Games scored higher. Game 7 also marks Rogers\u2019 best audience on record. The Sportsnet audience peaked at 14 million viewers in the bottom of the ninth inning. That comes after early data shows that Game 7 drew 25.5 million viewers on Fox<\/a> in the U.S. (SBJ Media<\/a>). The GLOBE & MAIL\u2019s Simon Houpt noted 18.5 million viewers caught some part of the game on Sportsnet. This \u201ccapped a record-setting World Series run for the network,\u201d with \u201call seven games becoming the seven most-watched Blue Jays games ever.\u201d The seven games \u201cpulled in an average audience of 7.5 million, with 23 million viewers\u201d — or about 56% of Canada\u2019s population — tuning in at some point. Sportsnet\u2019s \u201cstellar run was marred by a pair of ill-timed technical glitches that crashed the company\u2019s Sportsnet+ app<\/a>,\u201d including one during the seventh inning of Game 7. It lasted \u201cabout 45 minutes,\u201d coming back shortly after the Dodgers had tied the game 4-4 in the top of the ninth, coming after a \u201csimilar outage\u201d in Game 4 (GLOBE & MAIL, 11\/3<\/a>). <\/p>\n

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE: PUCK\u2019s John Ourand wrote for decades, networks have \u201cavoided scheduling big events in the dead zone of Saturday evening.\u201d But as Nielsen changes how it measures viewers outside the home, network execs \u201chave told me that they are reevaluating that conventional wisdom.\u201d And while MLB and Fox \u201cwould have preferred a Sunday night Game 7, under normal circumstances, only a blockhead would try to take on NBC\u2019s Sunday Night Football, the last vestige of broadcast monoculture.\u201d Given the viewership numbers from this weekend, it would not \u201cbe a surprise to see future World Series Game 7s scheduled for Saturday nights, at least for the foreseeable future.\u201d It is clear that Nielsen\u2019s expanded out-of-home viewing counts have \u201cboosted sports viewership more than any other development over the past decade\u201d (PUCK, 11\/3<\/a>). <\/p>\n

EDGE OF OUR SEATS: THE ATHLETIC\u2019s Richard Deitsch notes it was Fox Sports play-by-play announcer Joe Davis fourth World Series call, and he \u201cmay never call a more dramatic World Series than the one that just concluded.\u201d Davis said, \u201cIt\u2019s still very hard to wrap my mind around where it stands in baseball history and, specific to me, it\u2019s hard to wrap my mind around where Game 7 stands of all the games I\u2019ve been fortunate to call.\u201d Then came the bottom of the ninth. Davis said, \u201cI was thinking there\u2019s so many different ways that this World Series could end. \u2026 As calm and as steady as you are trying to be, it\u2019s a white-knuckle moment knowing that anything could happen.\u201d As Davis and analyst John Smoltz were narrating the play, Fox producer Pete Macheska and director Matt Gangl said that things in the broadcast production truck were \u201cchanging by the minute.\u201d They went from \u201csetting up isolated camera shots on Blue Jays players in anticipation of a final out to shifting to a new plan following [Dodgers SS Miguel] Rojas\u2019s homer\u201d (THE ATHLETIC, 11\/4<\/a>). <\/p>\n

GOING DOWN IN HISTORY: In Toronto, Jake Edmiston writes the 2025 World Series was the \u201clargest international broadcast operation in the history of the sport, after a surge of interest from television audiences across Canada and Japan.\u201d For the first time, MLB allowed for four separate television productions to broadcast the World Series. Typically, Fox handles the U.S. broadcast, and MLB produces a \u201cmore generic version\u201d for stations around the world. As part of Rogers\u2019 deal with MLB, Sportsnet was allowed to produce its own Blue Jays-centric broadcast<\/a> of the World Series, with its own cameras and staff at the stadium. And with \u201centhusiasm soaring\u201d in Japan, Japanese public broadcaster NHK was on the ground to make its own version as well. MLB SVP\/Broadcasting Ryan Zander said at the Rogers Centre before Game 7, \u201cI counted probably over 100 cameras. A regional game, sometimes it\u2019s like seven to 10 cameras\u201d (TORONTO STAR, 11\/4<\/a>). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sportsnet averaged 10.9 million viewers for Game 7 of the Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series, the best English-language, non-Olympic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261428,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[3307,49,48,75,462,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-261427","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}