Royal Wedding Ratings: Did the world tune in?
The Royal Wedding was one of the best watched UK TV broadcasts of all time, but how was it received by global audiences?
Some 26.2 million viewers watched Prince William and Kate Middleton tie the knot across BBC1, ITV1, BBC News channel, Sky News and Sky Living.
That is shy of the 28.4 million that watched Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding in 1981 but higher than the Only Fools Christmas special from 1996, which clocked up 24.4 million.
Most UK viewers by far watched the Royal Wedding on the BBC. Its coverage, hosted by Huw Edwards, beat ITV's by three to one with a peak audience of 19.3 million.
Before the wedding some newspapers made ambitious predictions that it would be watched by as many as two billion people around the globe - almost a third of the world's population.
But as the ratings tumble in from overseas it appears that, while many did tune in, the wedding fell well short of such outlandish expectations.
The Nielsen Company said that an average of 22.7 million viewers at home in the United States watched the wedding live.
While that figure is not to be sniffed at (especially so because many viewers would have had to get up in the middle of the night or very early morning to tune in) it is not a patch on the giant audiences networks in the US can command.
To put it into context, February's Super Bowl, the most watched single broadcast in US history, drew a US audience of 111 million.
In India, 42.1 million tuned into Friday's ceremony according to the ratings agency aMap. But again the country's interest in the Royals pales in comparison to its love for sport.
As the Times of India reports, this year's cricket World Cup final attracted an audience of almost 67 million, more than one-and-a-half times the peak Indian viewership of the Royal Wedding.