Television By Numbers and Sports TV Ratings report that the debut of Premier Boxing Champions on Friday night on SpikeTV drew an average viewership of 869,000 viewers. It received a 0.3 rating in the adult demo of 18-34.

According to Spike, PBC drew 1 million viewers between 10:45pm-11:15pm ET which was during the Josesito Lopez-Andre Berto fight. PBC was to air from 9-11pm but there was a 20 minute overrun for the main event. The event average made it the “most watched boxing event on Friday nights in 8 years” according to Spike. The highlights from Friday’s fights have been viewed 1.5 million times between PBC’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.

The event was the debut of Spike’s revamped Friday Night programming featuring combat sports. PBC featured Lopez versus Berto in the main event. Berto won via 6th round TKO.

The event drew 869,000 viewers over the 2 hours and 20 minutes airing on SpikeTV. It did run opposite a lot of College Basketball as the conference tournaments were in full swing. Notably, the ACC conference tournament game between Duke and Notre Dame on ESPN was the highest-rated sports cable program on Friday night as it received 2.617M viewers for a game that started at 9:50pm on the east coast. Preceding that game on ESPN, North Carolina and Virgina drew 2.054M viewers at 7:00pm.

Per TV By Numbers, the highest-rated show on cable on Friday the 13th was Gold Rush on the Discovery Channel which drew 3.274M viewers.

If you are a boxing cynic, the lead-in for PBC, Cops, drew a higher rating in its 30 minutes preceding boxing with an average viewership over 1 million viewers. Then again, Cops usually does great ratings and in defense of boxing the event was over 2 hours.

Payout Perspective:

Overall, it was a very good showing and the fights were entertaining. Perhaps the best fight was Arreola-Harper although it was not aesthetically pleasing. With college basketball games going on during the fights, it may have taken some of the audience away from PBC. Based on the information provided, it appears that PBC has gained a sufficient amount of buzz with its promotion and marketing of its events. We will see if it can improve on the number when it returns on April 24th to SpikeTV.