Nielsen: 30-Plus Million Watch SOTU

According to Nielsen, 31.3 million viewers (2-plus) tuned in Jan. 13 to watch the President deliver his last State of the Union address.

The combined household rating was a 19.6 and the average household number was 23,040,590.

The speech went from 9 to 10:15 p.m. and was carried live on a dozen broadcast and cable nets--and aired tape-delayed on Univision.

That 31.3 million figure is the sum of the average audience across those networks--ABC, Al Jazeera America, Azteca, CBS, CNN, Fox, Fox Business Network, Fox News Channel, Galavision, MSNBC, NBC and NBC Universo.

Nielsen said that 9.8 million people in the Twitterverse saw at least one of the more than 2.6 million Tweets about the speech, with a spike coming at 10:10 as the President was wrapping up.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.