Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium put an average audience of 10.6 million on the Canada-U.S. hockey game at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, making it the most-watched sports programme in Canadian history — ahead of the 10.3 million who watched the same fixture for gold at Salt Lake City in 2002.
The Globe and Mail treated the figure as a surprise, arriving as it did “in the age of fragmented viewing and new media”. It was not much of one. The Games were being held in Vancouver and Canadian athletes were winning medal after medal; hockey is the national sport and a source of considerable pride; and the match was a rematch of 2002, which gave the audience a specific outcome to want.
The rest of the explanation is what television is still good at. Live broadcasting and appointment viewing are the two strengths a mass medium keeps when everything around it fragments, and this event was both. A stream was available online, and it was also precisely the sort of game people wanted on the largest screen in the house.
The audience research of the period pointed the same way: rather than cannibalising television, the internet was emerging as a parallel medium, with people online and watching a broadcast at the same time.