A total of 190 million people in China alone tuned in to watch the world's biggest table tennis event live on CCTV5 between 28 February to 6 March 2016 over the 50 hours of live telecast on the network.
On hearing the record figures, ITTF's Marketing Director Steve Dainton stated: "We are ecstatic with the TV viewers in China, Japan and other territories around the World. The World Table Tennis Championships continues to prove the enormous interest of the sport and even in these countries. It's our goal now to increase the number of territories to have similar interest globally, it's a great challenge, but these figures show that due to the popularity of our wonderful sport that it is for sure achievable!"
An average of 22 million people tuned into CCTV5 to watch the Men's Final between China & Japan, and 60 million people watched at least 1 minute of the match that China won to become the World Team Champions.
Mr Pierre Justo, Managing Director of CSM Media Research-KantarSport Asia, whose company supplied these figures to the ITTF stated: "With close to 200 million unique viewers and a Men's Final which is the sports program with the highest viewership in 2016 (60 million reach for the Men's Final alone), the 2016 World Team Championships also has the best table tennis audience in more than five years.
The 2016 World Championships again shows that table tennis is a massive sport in China and attracts the interest of a wide spectrum of the Chinese population.
The TV audience from Kuala Lumpur is similar to other top sports audiences in 2015, such as the Football Asian Champions League Final, the Women's Volleyball World Cup Final and the IAAF World Championships.
"It's also worth adding that such impressive results were not only noticed in China. The audience numbers released in Japan show that millions of viewers were also in front of their TV sets to support their national teams, in such high levels never seen before for table tennis in Japan, where football, baseball, sumo or running races usually top the sports audiences."
As mentioned by Mr Justo, Japanese audiences tuned into the Perfect 2016 World Team Table Tennis Championships in record numbers. Rights holder TV Tokyo received a record 15% market share for TV viewers in Japan for the Women's Final, which is close to a record for the network for Sunday night viewing.
The event host broadcaster Astro also showed support to the World Championships gaining a reach of over 2,200,000 in Malaysia.
Figures for the other 87 territories over 14 networks that took the 54th edition of the World Championships live will be released shortly.
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