Viewers flock to ESPN Mobile for Tiger Woods mea culpa

Millions of viewers turned to ESPN across the broadcast giant's three screens for coverage and analysis of disgraced golfer Tiger Woods's Friday media event, where he publicly apologized for his much-discussed marital infidelities. Three ESPN networks aired Woods' statement live--the broadcaster averaged a 1.4 rating, triple the audience tuning in 24 hours earlier, with ESPN2's audience increasing 48 percent day-over-day and ESPNEWS up four times over its average. ESPN.com logged in more than 5 million page views of Woods-related content over the weekend and over 1.6 million video starts--the live stream of the event logged in an audience three times larger than the site's previous high.

ESPN Mobile notched an additional 1.1 million page views, and Woods-related content contributed to ESPN's biggest mobile video day of the year so far--viewers spent an average of 9 minutes and 15 seconds screening the 13-minute statement on their handsets. At the same time, ESPNRadio.com generated the largest concurrent streaming audience for a single event in its decade-long history--5,000 of the 85,000 total listeners tuned in the ESPN Radio app for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch.

It's not the first time Tiger Woods delivered a massive mobile audience for ESPN. During coverage of golf's 2008 U.S. Open--which culminated in a sudden-death playoff pairing eventual winner Woods against underdog Rocco Mediate--ESPN's WAP site averaged more than 2 million unique daily visitors seeking golf information, generating nearly 3 million mobile page views.

For more on ESPN's Woods coverage results:
- read this release

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