Who has gotten the most cumulative audience-hours on television?

Cafe Society
1

The answer to a related question, who has been on television the most hours, is answered here: Regis Philbin at 15,188 hours.

However I’d like the answer to a slightly different question, one which I realize might just come down to speculation. Who has had the most hours of being watched spent on them? That is, if a couple watches a Seinfeld episode where Jason Alexander is on screen for eight minutes, he gets sixteen minutes added to his total.

I’m pretty sure some big shot actors are eventually able to negotiate royalties that might approximate this statistic into their contracts, in that they get cuts of syndication money, and syndication rights are bid up by television channels based on what viewership they think they can pull. But that would only ever be a rough approximation, especially since Jerry Seinfeld probably commands more cash for the same amount of time than Wayne Knight.

One could hack together a more accurate figure with access to decades of television ratings and just lists of characters for each show episode, if not specifically screen time. Has somebody already done this?

Lastly I suspect the collective intelligence here at the Dope has some good guesses about who would qualify. Off the top of my head, the list of people with over a billion audience-hours would include high-ranking sports broadcasters, national news anchors, and stars of long-running and long-syndicated shows. Also VIPs who are in very public positions such as POTUS.

Here are some back of the envelope figures:

Barack Obama @ 5 State of the Union Addresses @ ~60 mins @ ~40mil viewers each: 200 million hours. Surely his total including the rest of the Presidential publicity, and campaigning and debates and ads, is well over a billion.

Jon Stewart @ ~2,000 hosted Daily Show episodes as of 2013 @ ~20 mins @ ~1.4mil viewers per night as of 2008: 930 million hours

Lucille Ball @ 40 million viewers per year even in 2011 @ 60 years since first aired @ 20 minutes an episode: 800 million hours (I will admit this is the sloppiest guess)

Neil Armstrong @ the 2 minutes of the first steps @ 530 million live viewers but I’m assuming almost everybody alive since has seen them so anywhere up to ~9 billion: 18-300 million hours

And for funsies, the most watched video on Youtube is the music video for Psy Gangnam Style @ 1.7 billion complete views @ 4 minutes: 110 million hours

Is there anybody out there that’s already done the figures for this question? Obviously for each of my examples I’m excluding a lot of other material that would have pushed them over a billion hours, but maybe it’s harder than I guessed.

2

Moved to Cafe Society.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

3

David Letterman?

4

Oprah Winfrey has got to be in the running I think.

25 seasons of the Oprah Winfrey Show, good attendance throughout:

Take an average of 10 million viewers per day. 4,561 episodes at 45 minutes (0.75 hours) each. I make that over 34 billion audience hours, based on the US audience alone.

Oh and the show screened in 148 other countries as well…

5

Walter Cronkite?

6

Bob Barker?

7

I bet it’s somebody like Dan Castellaneta, who voices a bunch of characters on The Simpsons. 25 years of primetime episodes and countless hours worth of syndication on multiple channels all over the world.

Talk show hosts probably pull in more viewers per episode, but there’s comparatively little repeat viewing compared to a sitcom.

8

If voice actors/animated characters count, The Simpsons must be way up there.

9

Or Mel Blanc.

One of the Spanish stations on my cable lineup has “Family Guy” in Spanish, with voice-over actors who sound very similar to the ones who do the English voices. It’s really weird to listen to it.

10

Similarly back of the envelope calculations for Johnny Carson gave me around 45 billion audience hours in his 30 year run. He had the advantage of his shows being 1’ 45" long during the first 18 years although he never came close to averaging 10 million viewers. His best rated shows were only in the high 9 millions.

11

I’ll bet all the above will be relative unknowns compared with the Soviet Leaders.

12

Good question. I think you can make a reasonable estimate for tv professionals by their yearly earnings. The cumulative tv hours watched is their product, so it follows that they would be paid roughly according to that. (Otherwise they could find some other station that would pay them more.) As I gather, Oprah Winfrey hasbeen far the highest earner for an extended period, so she must be far the most watched too. (Among people who are paid to appear on tv.) That leaves us politicians, other famous people such as Armstrong, and movie stars, based on tv showings of their movies.

13

Without going to IMDB or Wiki, I’d guess Hank Azaria does more voices then Dan.

Then there’s this guy and I’m sure quite a few more in the industry that do many, many voices that you know and love.

14

What about soap opera stars? They can go for decades and decades and decades.

15

See, I thought about other countries’ political leaders, too, but I honestly don’t know enough about the patterns of television viewing in most other countries to contribute any useful speculation. Do people in China watch Xi Jinping for at least one solid hour every year plus dozens of minute-ish clips like ~40 million Americans do with Barack Obama? Are the Kims in North Korea featured on their television enough to dream of catching up to Oprah’s 34+ billion hours?

It also feels like there should be some superstar actors in Latin America or Europe that just haven’t made the cultural leap to recognizability in the US, but are still in the running.

16

In the UK, it’s Carole Hersee. She appeared on Test Card F for over 70,000 hours over the years.