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RWC 2019 broke broadcast viewing records. World Rugby has confirmed that the Japan hosted tournament was the sport’s most watched event of all-time. This included 857 million viewers from around the world or a 26% increase from England and Wales 2015.
Among the feats that RWC 2019 achieved are that domestic viewing in Japan easily overcame prior records and the RWC 2019 Final was the most watch of all RWC finals too date.
In Japan there was a cumulative audience of 425 million. This figure is more than five times the Japanese viewership for England 2015. This gives World Rugby plenty to think about as the safe market of the UK was ultimately outperformed by one deemed to be a risky RWC host. This bares relevance to a prospective RWC in Argentina, Canada, the USA, or North America.
Also of note is that viewers from outside of Europe were responsible for 71% of the total TV audience. This is approaching double that from RWC 2015. It is a strong indication of the possibilities of market expansion that exist by staging RWCs outside of repeated locations.
World Rugby also noted a boom from viewers in Asia and Germany. Germany represented the country with the seventh highest viewing numbers for the tournament. It had 10.82 million cumulative viewers, a number greater than both Italy and Ireland. There was also a rise of over 55% in the cumulative TV audience across German-speaking countries.
In Asia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam were all among the world’s top 20 global TV markets for RWC 2019. India was also listed as one of the largest growing TV audience markets.
