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The Royal Wedding ended up being a cause for celebration for more than just Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. U.S. TV networks saw a bigger viewership for Markle and Prince Harry’s nuptials than they did for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s in 2011.
In spite of diminishing TV audiences, this year’s Windsor Castle affair garnered an estimated 29.2 million viewers in the U.S, according to a new Nielsen report. Compare that to the 2011 Royal Wedding, which drew 23 million viewers in the U.S.
Networks have been preparing for the event since the engagement was announced in November 2017. NBC, for instance, struck a deal with a local hotel to get views of Windsor Castle which is typically off-limits to cameras. The network also sent more than 10 correspondents to England.
CBS also secured its own hotel deal. The network, which aired a prime-time special on Meghan Markle in April, dedicated six hours of coverage and ran a wedding recap special Saturday night.
On social, there were 6.9 million interactions across Facebook and Twitter, according to Nielsen. TV networks also dedicated resources to producing video content for Snapchat. NBC, for its part, had a correspondent on the ground to host the network’s Snapchat show Stay Tuned and TLC ran a four-part video series on the wedding.
“A wedding like this doesn’t come along very often, but any time you can, that is sustained coverage, and it’s kinda why you get into the business” Ryan Kadro, executive producer of “CBS This Morning,” told Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary.
Correction: A previous version of this story put the engagement date in April 2018. The pair announced their engagement in November 2017.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
