The premiere of Stargate Universe north of the border made for the SPACE network’s biggest audience ever for a single episode broadcast, the network said in a press release Monday.
“Air” Parts 1 and 2 drew some 565,000 viewers on Friday night, when it premiered simultaneous with the Syfy Channel broadcast in the U.S. Two additional broadcasts on Saturday brought the show up to 2.3 million viewers (though logically some of those may have been repeat viewers), nearly equaling the Friday night audience for Syfy.
SGU was the number one non-sports specialty program of the day, the network said, including in the key demographics of adults 25 to 54 and adults 18 to 49.
The broadcast was followed by SPACE’s new series Innerspace, which examined Stargate Universe and featured actor Louis Ferreira (“Col. Everett Young”).
“Air” makes its U.K. premiere tonight at 8 p.m. on Sky1. In Australia, it will debut Friday on SCI FI Channel.
Fans in Canada, meanwhile, can catch up on the first two hours of the new show by watching the series premiere online at Spacecast.com.
Stargate Universe continues in Canada this Friday, now in its regular time slot at 10 p.m. Eastern (9 p.m. in the U.S.). Learn more about “Air, Part 3” in GateWorld’s episode guide, then come back to the site for our complete coverage of the next episode — images, a transcript, episode summary … and the long-awaited relaunch of The Stargate Omnipedia!
(Thanks to Morjana for the tip!)
Maybe now SPACE will simulcast more shows with Syfy. I’m willing to bet that SPACE loses a lot of their audience since most shows release a season on DVD before it is even aired here. They lose me, at the very least.
I have a question. Say thatSGU continues to do this well in Canada, and also rates highly in the UK and Australia, but in the US fails to get acceptable ratings for SyFy to keep it on the line-up.
Could MGM still produce Universe for these “outside the US” markets?
Would they produce enough revenue?
Just wondering how these things work.
Also, 1.7 million additional people tuned in on Saturday? Thats more than double what they got Friday night, correct? (I’m horrible at math).
Perhaps they should consider airing it on Saturdays instead of Fridays!
I really hope it does not come to that!!! I live in the U.S. and am a huge StarGate fan, but I am not going to lie I like the new show so far but…. so far it does not have that good old StarGate magic feeling! However as a die hard fan I will stick with it and hope for the best!
All the nay sayers should read about this. Give it a chance. No show has ever been totally fantastic from the 1st show. Just check out Wil Wheaton’s new book, Memories of the Future, where he writes about how BAD the 1st season of STNG was! Just think if you based your whole idea of what STNG would be just on viewing the pilot episode, Incident at Farpoint. Everyone wold have worse things to say about it than they have about SGU. STNG developed ovr time into an excellent show.
Well said ictus, we haven’t actually seen the gate action yet, lets see how they handle the important stuff and make calls then.
thank you for the ratings update!
I wonder if they will stick with the old formula and add an alien to the team!!! Maybe we will get an alien that is not humanoid!!!
But by following the link and reading the fine print the ratings record was for the most viewers over two consecutive minutes by the sounds of it, rather than for the entire airing of the progrmme, unless I’m reading the press release incorrectly?
“I’m willing to bet that SPACE loses a lot of their audience since most shows release a season on DVD before it is even aired here.” My understanding is that that has little to do with Space. Astral Media, who own TMN, had Canadian broadcast rights to Stargate: Atlantis and Sanctuary (season 1). Space wasn’t allowed to air them until after TMN did (probably until at least a year after TMN did). Space aired BSG at the same time as SciFi and is now going to be airing Sanctuary (season 2) and SG: U at the same time as SciFi… Read more »
I’m glad to hear that it’s doing so well; being on a channel you don’t have to fork out an extra few bucks for per month sounds like it’s not hurting. :)
Congratulations SGU!!! Well done!!!
Pretty big achievement for not airing in HD. Space has an HD license but hasn’t made the switch. I refused to watch bsg on crappy cable tv SD and won’t watch stargate universe on it either (i’ll seek out other sources). I wonder if this number would of been even higher had they aired it in HD?
Additional Comment: I preferred it when MovieCentral has bought the rights to air stargate first. At least moviecentral (or movienetwork in the east), aired SGA in HD. I guess i’m pretty dissapointed that Canada’s only sci-fi station can’t be bothere to make the HD switch. SD cable TV looks pretty inferior on an HD TV.
@Sylvia The additional viewers were the combined numbers from additional showings of the episode. I bet at least 50% of the second airing and 40% of the 3rd airing were repeat viewers. Making the overall number of distinct viewers much smaller. Ratings and share are what are important to advertisers though, since they know that adding viewership numbers together inhearently overstates viewership. Also, whether ratings outside the US would keep a show going depends entirely on how much those foreign networks contribute to the budget of the show. ScyFy can have much lower ratings on, say Dr. Who, than SGU… Read more »
@cmuty Thanks!
I loved the episodes! This is exactly what I was hoping for with a new Stargate series. I am eagerly awaiting Air 3. Well done to the producers of the show.
Followed by one lonely person for episode 2.