By Keith Idec

NEW YORK – Showtime Sports produced a rare ratings victory over rival HBO Sports for competing boxing broadcasts Saturday night.

Viewership for Showtime’s doubleheader, which featured a WBA featherweight championship rematch in which Leo Santa Cruz avenged his defeat to Carl Frampton, peaked at 643,000, according to ratings released Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research. The Santa Cruz-Frampton rematch drew an average audience of 587,000 viewers from MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” main event – former WBC world super featherweight champion Francisco Vargas’ bloody, brutal, 11th-round technical knockout loss to fellow Mexican Miguel Berchelt in Indio, California – attracted a peak audience of 549,000 viewers and averaged 497,000 viewers. The Santa Cruz-Frampton rematch and the Vargas-Berchelt bout aired mostly at the same time Saturday night, between 11 p.m. and 12 a.m. ET.

The peak audience for HBO’s entire telecast was the 561,000 viewers that tuned in to watch at least some of a super featherweight fight Japan’s Takashi Miura won by 12th-round knockout against Mexico’s Miguel Roman.

“We’re certainly very happy with the ratings and very happy how we performed head-to-head,” said Stephen Espinoza, executive vice president and general manager for Showtime Sports. “But most importantly, we’re happy with the action in the ring. Because ratings and viewership are an incidental byproduct of doing good fights. And the belief is if, for the good of the sport and for the good of the network, if we continue to do high-quality and entertaining fights, the audience will show up. And that’s good for us and good for the sport.”

Espinoza added that this was the first time since he was hired to his position in November 2011 that Showtime has scored a better rating than HBO when the premium-cable networks televised fights simultaneously. Showtime has approximately 24 million subscribers, somewhere between 8-9 million fewer than HBO.

The last night HBO and Showtime televised boxing at the same time, HBO’s main event drew more than twice as many viewers as the one Showtime aired December 10.

That night, WBC/WBO super lightweight champion Terence Crawford’s eighth-round stoppage of John Molina Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, peaked at 871,000 viewers and averaged 806,000 viewers for HBO. Showtime’s main event December 10, Abner Mares’ split-decision win against Jesus Cuellar in a WBA featherweight title fight in Los Angeles, peaked at 377,000 viewers and averaged 327,000.

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.