The BBC claims it was the first broadcaster to call the Obama victory in the US presidential election last week and that it reined in 6.1 million viewers on BBC1 or BBC News over Tuesday night.
Talking to the Independent, head of BBC news Peter Horrocks said that the BBC also pulled in its highest ever web figures, with 7.4 million users logging on.
“We’ve had our highest ever figures online,’he said: ‘That and the international competition is becoming the big thing now.”
“We were pretty competitive with the Americans. Obviously we’ve got to be strong against UK competition, Sky and ITV, and we were faster than them and went to more places.”
‘The service we did was for BBC World News, the BBC News channel in the UK, BBC One and BBC America. It was only one service for all those different audiences, going head to head with CNN and the other American television services.”
Burrell dismissed the competition, saying that UK newspaper websites ‘weren’t really at the races’and is not impressed by Sky’s use of a ‘white house’ in Florida but said diversity is a good thing.
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