Not on this planet. Oscarbeat by Steve Pond takes a serious look at the numbers. Two excerpts:
In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, columnist Steve Rushin nicely dismantles the billion figure as it applies to the Super Bowl. It turns out a media research firm measured the worldwide audience for last year’s game and came up with a figure of 93 million, only about 2 million of them from outside North America.
The U.S. audience for the Oscars was 42.1 million last year, though it’s been significantly higher in years past. In the rest of the world, the telecast begins at inconvenient hours (5:00 p.m. in Los Angeles is 1:00 a.m. in England) or tape-delayed and presented in an edited form after the winners are already known.