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There is no way this is a made-up number
The First Post makes a bold claim for Michael Jackson's funeral audience:
Sixteen American TV networks carried the memorial live. In Britain BBC2 cleared its schedule to show the service in its entirety, and around the world it is estimated to have been watched by one billion TV viewers.
"Cleared its schedule" sounds so much more exciting than "held over an episode of Eggheads", doesn't it?
But what about the "billion" viewers? The First Post calls this an estimate, which is fine - but who has estimated it? On what basis?
Or is it merely a clicking of the tongue, extrapolating that it was shown in a few countries, and picking a large sounding number out of the air?
2 comments:
Luckily, UK Gold was showing re-runs of 'Yes Minister' for the grown-ups.
Around 6.5m people watched in the UK according to early figures... Which is about 105 of the population. If that was replicated around the world, the figure would be roughly 600m, rather than 1bn.
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