Leadoff: Counting the minutes Atlantans spend watching the Braves
Ever wondered how much time Atlantans collectively spend watching the Braves on television over the course of a six-month-long season?
Well, Fox’s regional sports networks have an answer for that.
They tabulate “total viewing consumption,” which they define as the total number of household minutes a team is watched across an entire season. The calculation is done by multiplying the average number of households that watched a team’s games by the total number of minutes televised in a season.
Based on that formula, this is Fox Sports’ tabulation of how many minutes households in the Atlanta TV market collectively spent watching the Braves on Fox Sports South and Fox Sports Southeast last season:
More than 1.4 billion minutes.
Or, to be more precise, 1,402,500,000.
To arrive at that large number, the average audience for 158 Braves telecasts in the Atlanta market (44,000 households) was multiplied by the total number of minutes televised in the season (31,875 minutes, including rain delays).
Jeff Genthner, senior vice president and general manager of Fox Sports South and Fox Sports Southeast, said the Braves’ 1.4 billion household minutes exceeded the total generated in the Atlanta TV market by the top seven prime-time entertainment shows combined. Although all of those shows had higher ratings and much larger average audiences than Braves games, none of them were on the air with the frequency or duration of an MLB team, of course.
“It’s an interesting way to think about it, because it’s about the duration of time you’re talking to an audience,” Genthner said. “You can say, ‘Well, the audience for those other shows is bigger.’ But it’s in 30- or 60-minute windows, and we’ve got them for three hours and 20 minutes a night, 158 nights a year.”
The mega-number of minutes consumed is largely a reflection of the number of baseball games and the length of those games. But it quantifies how much time the market spends watching all those games – time that should increase as the Braves improve on the field.
A recent report in SportsBusiness Journal about this same metric pointed out the Cleveland Indians, who won 102 regular-season games last year, averaged an audience of 121,000 households per game on Fox's SportsTime Ohio and almost 3.8 billion total minutes of consumption for the season.
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TODAY’S LEADOFF LINKS
> The Falcons asked Matt Ryan to save the franchise. And he did, Mark Bradley writes.
> With the Hawks having reduced their search for a head coach to four candidates, Michael Cunningham offers some background on each of them.
> The Georgia Tech football careers of A.J. Gray and Jake Stickler are over due to medical reasons, Ken Sugiura reports.
About the Author
Tim Tucker, a long-time AJC sports reporter, often writes about the business side of the games. He also had stints as the AJC's Braves beat writer, UGA beat writer, sports notes columnist and executive sports editor. He was deputy managing editor of America's first all-sports newspaper, The National Sports Daily.
