Your report on Sydney’s new year fireworks (31 December) claimed there would be “an estimated 1 billion people watching on television”. One in eight of everyone on the planet? That cannot be possible. Perhaps you meant 1 billion might have seen bits of the display on TV news bulletins. But how can anyone say even that with any degree of certainty?
As one who has spent most of my professional life trying to measure audiences for all kinds of media, I can say with some degree of certainty that probably only once have as many as 1 billion people watched more or less the same thing on TV (not necessarily all at the same time). That was the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics – but even that cannot be proven, as global audiences are calculated from a mixture of genuine measurement, extrapolation and guesswork.
Dr Graham Mytton
Audience Research Training and Consultancy
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