IndyCar Toronto TV rating

UPDATE #3 Responding to the reader who criticized the broadcast, we did some research. As it turns out ABC are not allowed to go side-by-side during local commercial breaks. Local TV stations control those and ABC is not allowed to intrude. ABC is obligated to give one local break per half hour. The broadcast last weekend had four local breaks and those were the only times they didn't go side-by-side. NBC Sports Network operates in a cable world and their rules may be different. The bottom line is that a broadcast is always going to have the same number of commercial breaks. The only question is how they get them spaced out. They prefer to make sure that they don't get backlogged so that they can get the last 10-15 minutes of the race on live. Sometimes that means when the race action is a little slow, and they know that there will be pit stops coming up, they'll make it a short segment. Of course the nature of racing is that they can never guarantee when it will be slow so there's always the chance they can miss something (which is why ESPN/ABC started side-by-side). The Toronto race had its share of flaws, but we don't think that the structure of the commercial breaks was one of them. Mark C. AR1.com

07/12/12 The final TV rating for last Sunday's Toronto IndyCar race was 0.8 with an average of 1,129,334 viewers.

07/09/12 A reader writes, Dear AutoRacing1, As a lifelong IndyCar fan, I must say that Sunday's ABC telecast of the Toronto Indy was one of the worst I've seen on network television. A commercial every 3 minutes, half of the commercial breaks were not side-by-side, and several of the side-by-side commercial breaks were under yellow caution laps. Is ABC even trying at this point to produce a quality broadcast? Does the IndyCar management even care about the quality of their broadcasts?

I'm a die hard IndyCar fan. That means I will torture myself every race weekend watching mediocre IndyCar broadcasts. But what about the casual fan or prospecting new viewers? How can you keep casual fans or new fans interested if a network like ABC is cutting away from the action every 3 minutes to bring you commercials? A casual fan or new viewer will click away to another channel! I guess the IndyCar management is happy with 0.9 TV ratings? Tony Ciarfella, New Jersey

07/09/12 The overnight TV rating for the Izod IndyCar Series Honda Indy Toronto on ABC Sunday was a 0.9, which represents about 1.2 million viewers.