Americans stay away from TV on holiday week

[December 31, 2008]  NEW YORK (AP) -- Viewers celebrated the holidays last week in large part by staying away from their sets.

Only two prime-time shows reached more than 12 million viewers all week, according to Nielsen Media Research. They were NBC's telecast of Sunday's Denver-San Diego football game, and CBS' "60 Minutes," a special on Barack Obama that was helped by directly following another National Football League game.

NBC's "Today" show proved it has little chance of expanding beyond the morning. The show's second-ever prime-time special, a review of some of the year's big events, was seen by 6.1 million people on NBC last Monday -- not much bigger than the morning audience.

For the 14th time this year, Univision quietly accomplished a feat that attests to its growing power. On Friday it beat all the English-language broadcast networks among the 18-to-49-year-old demographic, the one most eagerly sought by advertisers. Its big shows that night were the telenovelas "Fuego en la Sangre" ("Burning for Revenge") and "Cuidado con el Angel" ("Don't Mess With the Angel").

CBS averaged 7.6 million prime-time viewers (4.8 rating, 9 share) to win the week. NBC was second with 6.3 million (3.9, 7), Fox had 5.4 million (3.3, 6), ABC 4.7 million (2.9, 5), My Network TV 1.6 million (0.9, 2), the CW 1.3 million (0.8, 2) and ION Television 670,000 (0.4, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision averaged 3.2 million (1.5, 3), Telemundo had 1 million (0.5, 1), TeleFutura 590,000 (0.3, 1) and Azteca 170,000 (0.1, 0).

NBC's "Nightly News" topped the evening newscasts with an average of 9.3 million viewers (5.9, 12). ABC's "World News" was second with 8.8 million (5.8, 11) and the "CBS Evening News" had 6.8 million viewers (4.6, 9).

Based on the first couple of weeks, new host David Gregory is keeping NBC's "Meet the Press" in first place over the other Sunday political talk shows, Nielsen said.

A ratings point represents 1,145,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 114.5 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Dec. 22-28, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: "Sunday Night Football: Denver at San Diego," NBC, 14.85 million; "60 Minutes," CBS, 14.11 million; "Two and a Half Men," CBS, 11.82 million; "The Mentalist" (Tuesday, 10 p.m.), CBS, 10.68 million; "NCIS" (Tuesday, 9 p.m.), CBS, 10.6 million; "Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick," NBC, 10.14 million; "Million Dollar Password," CBS, 9.84 million; "Cold Case," CBS, 9.69 million; "CSI: Miami," CBS, 8.54 million; "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," CBS, 8.03 million.

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox and My Network TV are units of News Corp. NBC and Telemundo are owned by General Electric Co. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. Azteca America is a wholly owned subsidiary of TV Azteca S.A. de C.V.

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On the Net:

http://www.nielsenmedia.com/

[Associated Press; By DAVID BAUDER]

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