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Background
Nairobi Fight Night, televised coverage of boxing action, was aired live from Nairobi, Kenya on Saturday, the 23rd of March 2019. This was the second edition of the boxing series. The program was broadcast on select Free To Air (FTA) channels and Pay TV channels including, KBC, NTV, KTN News, K24, Sports Arena, StarTimes Swahili, SuperSport Select 3 and SuperSport 9.
The title fight for the evening was the World Boxing Council (WBC) Women Super Bantamweight fight between defending champion, Kenya’s Fatuma ‘Iron Fist’ Zarika, and former champion, Catherine Phiri, from Zambia. Zarika vs. Phiri’s match was accompanied by several other undercard bouts that were also aired live on TV from 8 PM on the same evening.
Total Viewership
The title fight between Zarika and Phiri aired from 10 PM to midnight. During this two-hour time slot, there were 7,343,000 Kenyan viewers tuned-into the match across multiple stations. The stations with the top share of the audience were as follows, in order of largest audience to the smallest audience: NTV with 3.4 million viewers, KTN News with 2.6 million viewers, K24 with 2.4 million viewers, and KBC with approximately 1 million viewers.
Across all of the stations broadcasting the match, viewership peaked slightly from 10:30 PM – 11 PM with 2,081,000 viewers and dipped lowest between 11:30 PM and midnight with 1,519,000 viewers. Just as the viewership across all stations, NTV’s and KBC’s viewership each peaked individually between 10:30 PM and 11 PM with 774,000 and 430,000 viewers respectively. The highest audience on KTN was within the two-hour block between 10 PM and 10:30 PM with 772,000 viewers, while K24’s peak viewing time during the match was 11 PM – 11:30 PM.
KE TV Stations’ Total Reach
On the evening of the March 23rd, 2019, between 10 PM and 12 AM. TV channels airing Nairobi Fight Night namely KTN, KTN News, NTV, K24, and KBC were ranked after Citizen TV in terms of reach respectively. These statistics demonstrate that despite boxing being a niche sport, Nairobi Fight Night was able to attract and retain viewership during the given time period.
Summary
TV ratings present an interesting finding where content buoys viewership. GeoPoll Audience Measurement data on past sporting events that are aired live have shown a preference for local and international football as well as athletics. Boxing was responsible for a shift in Saturday viewership attesting to the growing demand for alternative TV content. The narrative on time band viewing has been put to the test through content-specific programming in Kenya.