4:45 p.m. | Updated Lance Armstrong’s confession to Oprah Winfrey played out in the sports media for three days by the time she was shown on television asking, “Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?” and he was shown saying “yes.”

Maybe that is why the first part of Ms. Winfrey’s exclusive interview did not draw more than 4.3 million viewers to OWN on Thursday night. An average of 3.17 million viewers watched the 90-minute premiere, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings released on Friday.

Another 1.12 million watched a repeat later in the evening, bringing the total unduplicated audience to 4.3 million. That is a great result by OWN’s standards, but not by Ms. Winfrey’s standards. Some of her interviews on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” scored upward of 10 million viewers; her biggest, a prime-time interview with Michael Jackson, drew 62 million viewers to ABC in 1993.

2013 is a very different time, and cable is a different animal than broadcast. Some viewers had a hard time finding OWN on their cable lineups, as evidenced by a spike in online searches about the channel. Still, enough viewers found it to make Mr. Armstrong’s interview the highest-rated telecast in OWN’s two-year history, at least when both of Thursday’s telecasts are counted as one.

Previously, the title of highest-rated OWN telecast belonged to Ms. Winfrey’s interview of Whitney Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and her family last March, one month after Houston died. The premiere of that interview attracted 3.5 million viewers to the channel.

Of course, it was not promoted as heavily as Mr. Armstrong’s interview. After sitting down with Mr. Armstrong on Monday, Ms. Winfrey appeared on “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday and said, “I think it’s certainly the biggest interview I’ve ever done, in terms of its exposure,” comparing it to the Jackson interview in 1993.

Ms. Winfrey may have been hoping for a higher rating. But OWN and the company that co-owns the channel with Ms. Winfrey, Discovery Communications, cautioned ahead of time that Mr. Armstrong’s confessional might not hit the highs of the old “Oprah Winfrey Show” in syndication. For one thing, the daytime talk show was on popular local television stations that blanketed the country. OWN is only accessible in about four-fifths of the country’s homes. It is further hindered by the fact that, in many places, it’s not available in high-definition.

The initial ratings released on Friday did not include viewers who chose to record the interview and watch it over the weekend. Nor did they include viewers who watched the interview on the Internet, courtesy of an online stream on Oprah.com. An OWN spokeswoman said the Web site recorded more than 600,000 streams.

The first half, on Thursday, spurred a huge amount of chatter on social networking Web sites. Bluefin Labs, which tracks that chatter, found that an unofficial Twitter hashtag for the interview, #Doprah (a combination of doping and Oprah), was used more frequently than the one OWN encouraged, #OWNTV.

Notably, about 61 percent of the Twitter comments about the interview were from men, according to Bluefin. OWN skews much more toward women, with only 33 percent of Twitter comments about the channel coming from men. The television audience also skewed toward men.

One of Discovery’s other channels, TLC, showed the interview in many countries, but Nielsen does not provide ratings estimates outside of the United States.

The second part of the Armstrong interview will be shown on OWN on Friday night. Originally, Ms. Winfrey’s producers were going to edit it down to 90 minutes, but after she talked to Mr. Armstrong for two and a half hours on Monday, she conferred with the producers and decided to break it into two parts.

It was “impossible to try to cut 80 minutes out,” Ms. Winfrey said on CBS. “As you all know, a 90-minute interview on TV is really only 65 minutes.” She added, “We felt that to leave over half of this on the cutting room floor after millions of people have been waiting for years for many of these answers would not be the right thing to do.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/armstrong-confession-draws-4-3-million-viewers-to-oprahs-network/?partner=rss&emc=rss