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The third-season finale of Downton Abbey drew 8.2 million viewers for its Feb. 17 PBS broadcast, the network and WGBH announced Feb. 19. The numbers come from Nielsen and gave the episode a 5.2 household rating. The episode came in with 50 percent more viewers than the season two finale in 2012 and also drew 300,000 more fans than this year’s season premiere.
Amazon announced today it has struck a deal with PBS to make its online video streaming service, Prime Instant Video, the exclusive subscription streaming outlet for Downton Abbey. Beginning June 18, Prime Instant Video will be the only subscription streaming service where viewers will be able to watch Season 3 of the smash Masterpiece Classic program. The first and second seasons of the show are currently available on Amazon as well as on rival subscription streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but will migrate exclusively to Prime on an unspecified date “later this year,” according to a press release from Amazon. Prime will also be the only paid streaming service to offer Season 4 and, if produced, Season 5 of the series. Downton Abbey is already the most popular TV series among Amazon Prime customers, according to Brad Beale, Amazon director of digital video content acquisition.
As the executive producer who acquired and managed co-productions of British dramas for Masterpiece and its predecessor titles for more than 26 years, Eaton has brought high-profile miniseries such as Prime Suspect, Bleak House and recent hits Sherlock and Downton Abbey to PBS.
PBS was nominated in four categories at the 70th Golden Globe Awards Jan. 13, but only Dame Maggie Smith of Downton Abbey earned a win from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Smith won for Best Supporting Actress in a TV Series for the show’s second season. The awards, which celebrate both film and television, had also nominated Downton Abbey for Best Drama, while star Michelle Dockery had been nominated for Best Actress in a Drama. The Showtime series Homeland won in both categories. Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch had been nominated for Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, but lost to Kevin Costner for his work in History’s Hatfields & McCoys.
Three nights after 7.9 million people tuned into the third-season premiere of PBS’s Downton Abbey, WGBY in Springfield, Mass., will broadcast an interview tonight with Lady Carnarvon of Highclere Castle, the filming location of the BBC-produced series. The interview is being shown as an episode of the program Connecting Point and is not available for national carriage, so only those New Englanders lucky enough to receive the WGBY signal will be able to watch this evening. “I got in touch with Lady Carnarvon’s personal assistant last fall for a different reason,” WGBY spokesperson Myrna Flynn told Current regarding how the station landed the exclusive. “Circumstances naturally led to this. The Countess was very gracious and accommodating.” In 2011, the Countess authored a book, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle.
To whet local viewers’ appetites for the return of the megahit British drama Downton Abbey this Sunday, more than 100 pubcasting stations across the country have organized lively events evoking Edwardian England, the period in which the Masterpiece Classics series is set.
Fans of Masterpiece’s hit Downton Abbey await arrival of the British drama’s third season, PBS and some 70 local stations hope to reel them into the public TV membership fold with a Nov. 25 pledge special.
The Season 2 finale of Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Classic, aired Feb. 19, won the biggest audience for a PBS program since the premiere of Ken Burns’s National Parks: America’s Best Idea in September 2009. Nielsen estimated that 5.4 million viewers watched the two-hour finale, giving PBS a 3.5 household rating. That doesn’t include the additional viewers of rebroadcasts, DVR recordings and online streams, PBS said. For the seven-week season, broadcast viewing was double the PBS average in primetime and 25 percent higher than in Downton’s first season.
PBS’s ongoing negotiations to curb per-hour costs of producing programs and to assert more control over content are increasing friction with its largest producer, Boston’s powerhouse WGBH, according to sources at other stations with knowledge of the situation.
For a period until just four days before the second-season premiere of the gem of this season’s PBS schedule, Downton Abbey from Masterpiece Classic, the approval of PBS broadcast rights for the series hung in the balance as WGBH protested the network’s contract demands….
The return of Downton Abbey proved to be a ratings blockbuster for PBS, while critics mostly heaped praise on the Emmy-winning drama’s second season. Downton’s season premiere Jan. 8 [2012] attracted an average 4.2 million viewers, not including viewing through station replays, DVRs or online streaming. That figure was double the average primetime rating for PBS and exceeded the average rating of the first season of Downton Abbey by 18 percent, the network said. That night PBS’s audience was 64 percent larger than on previous Sundays this year, reaching an average Nielsen rating of 2.0, TRAC Media Services reported. In strong PBS cities Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and St.
Masterpiece Classic’s Downton Abbey led PBS’s Emmy winners. Among six Primetime Emmys presented in September [2011] to the British costume drama was the highly coveted statuette for best miniseries. Producers of documentary and performance series brought PBS’s Emmy total up to 14 while earning recognition for exceptional merit in filmmaking, nonfiction programming and Creative Arts specialties. The American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences presented its Primetime Emmys in two ceremonies last month: a Sept. 10 [2011] event recognizing achievements in TV’s Creative Arts, and a Sept.