8.7 million Canadians watched end of men's Olympic gold-medal hockey game

Nearly nine million Canadians watched the end of the men's gold-medal hockey game at the Milano-Cortina Olympics, which CBC says was Canada's most-watched moment at the Games.

But it's an apparent decline from Sochi 2014, the last time Canada's men's hockey team made it to the gold-medal matchup, when CBC said 15 million Canadians tuned in to some portion of the game and average viewership hovered at 8.5 million.

CBC didn't say how many people watched this year's game in total, or what the average viewership throughout the game was: only that 8.7 million were tuned in for the final goal, a number that doesn't include those streaming on Gem, a spokesperson said.

The broadcaster says roughly 30.5 million Canadians, about 73 per cent of the population, watched some portion of the Olympics on CBC's English and French TV networks and broadcast partners TSN, Sportsnet and RDS.

The broadcaster says its online content received 89 million "streams," which are counted when someone clicks the "play" button. That compares to 74 million streams during the Paris 2024 Olympics.

There's no minimum watch time required for it to be considered a stream, but the public broadcaster says viewers watched 42 million hours of content on CBC's digital and streaming platforms this year, including CBC Gem.

CBC says that's three times as many as the Beijing Olympics in 2022.

The 2022 Games were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and while streaming numbers were up from previous years as the technology was more widely adopted, viewership was generally lower than usual.

Jack Hughes' OT winner lifts U.S. over Canada to capture Olympic gold

CBC said it made promoting Gem a priority this year.

"Our main messaging across all of our [social media]