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The fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman is claimed to have a billion viewership.

For example Jet (Sep 1995):

the first one-billion viewer fight

Revisiting 'The Rumble in the Jungle' 40 years later:

reportedly reached one billion viewers,

This is quite hard to believe since the world had four billion total population at the time so one in four people would've needed to watch this. I am skeptical there were even enough televisions to do this. For example, Chinese Television and Radio claims "In 1978, there were 1 million television sets in China". India Media Stats claims "The number of Indian households with a TV set went from less than 1% in 1975...".

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    One billion viewers doesn't necessarily equal one billion TV sets. If you assume every TV tuned into the fight is being watched by five people, you "only" need 200 million. Having said that, how do you know how many people *are* watching a given TV set? I'd be surprised if there are any concrete viewership figures, at least on a global scale. – F1Krazy Jan 04 '22 at 17:24
  • In some poor rural communities, there might be a very large number of people watching the only television available. – Weather Vane Jan 04 '22 at 21:28
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    @F1Krazy Today, companies like Neilsen run large scale scientific surveys and extrapolate total viewership of given items. If there's any scientific surveys regarding this specific moment of television history, then we certainly could get a high confidence answer. –  Jan 04 '22 at 21:29
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    From what I am reading on wiki that isn't even the largest audience for one of his boxing matches and his funeral drew around that as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-watched_television_broadcasts – Joe W Jan 05 '22 at 00:39
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    @JoeW By the time of his funeral, there were 7 billion people in the world, and a much wider access to television, so that is considerably less surprising than the claims for the 1970s fights. – IMSoP Jan 05 '22 at 10:49
  • @IMSoP And that wasn't the point but a side note on his overall audience. If you note I also said that is appears he had boxing matches with much larger audiences that even neared 2 billion people. – Joe W Jan 05 '22 at 13:19
  • @JoeW Yes, I did see that; although I didn't say so very clearly, I mentioned "the 1970s fights", plural, as the surprising figures. Most of the references on Wikipedia are just retrospectives quoting the figures as "estimated audience", with no information on _who_ estimated that. The reference for the 1980 match claims it was the first broadcast in China, so for the 1978 match we have maybe 3.5 billion humans outside China, of whom 2 billion supposedly watched a boxing match. That's highly suspect to me. – IMSoP Jan 05 '22 at 13:58
  • @IMSoP And I didn't post it as an answer because I couldn't find how it was calculated. I was just trying to provide some additional information that I thought could be helpful. From my source I found 2 more boxing matches in the 70's (and one in 1980) that appear to have a larger audience as well as a concert in 1973. If you have a couple of sources claiming a single match has a high amount of viewers could be treated differently then if you have multiple sources claiming multiple events (different sources for the different events) have high viewer numbers. – Joe W Jan 05 '22 at 19:33
  • @JoeW Absolutely, I agree it's interesting. I wonder if there's a single underlying source for all these surprisingly high numbers, whose methodology we could investigate. – IMSoP Jan 05 '22 at 19:51
  • The more I look at this, the more convinced I am that these numbers have been either wildly exaggerated, or taken completely out of context, then repeated without any critical thinking until they become "facts". Compare [this question about the Tour de France](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22106/do-3-5-billion-people-watch-tour-de-france-on-tv-every-year) and see [my critiques of the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_most-watched_television_broadcasts#Extraordinary_claims_without_extraordinary_evidence) which Joe W pointed to. – IMSoP Jan 07 '22 at 16:47

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