England win sets new broadcasting record

England’s semi-final Euro 2020 victory over Denmark has broken UK broadcast records.

The match, which sets up the final between England and Italy on Sunday night from Wembley Stadium, was watched by a peak of 27.6 million across ITV, ITV Hub and STV. The total was a new record for a football match shown on a single channel in the UK.

The match peaked with 26.3 million viewers on ITV and an 89.3% audience share, along with a whistle-to-whistle audience of 23.9m (82.3 percent average share). This beat previous records of 27.5 million viewers for England’s defeat by Croatia in the 2018 World Cup and 26 million for England v Argentina in 1998.

The coverage – which ran from 6:30pm to 11:24pm, was watched by an average audience of 16.7m viewers and an additional 0.4m watched on non-TV devices on ITV Hub.

The match also managed a new record for ITV Hub and STV Player with 10.5 million and 0.5 million viewers respectively.

ITV also noted that its combined in-match audiences for the main channel during the Euro 2020 competition are now higher than for the BBC, with 7.237 million viewers compared to 7.160 million.