Family

Updated Feb. 13, 2013, 9:10am CT CNBC and USA Network will once again have live coverage of the famed Westminster Dog Show, now in its 137th year in 2013. In the past, the two networks have split coverage on opening night of the show, with CNBC picking up the last two hours so USA could flip over to WWE Raw. This year, the networks are perhaps trying to head off any confusion and loss of viewers that switchover may have caused by simply giving CNBC coverage of the entire Opening Night on Feb. 11, and having USA Network take over […]

While a record 164.1 million people watched some Ravens win the Super Bowl, millions of other fans were watching animals of another sort in a different type of bowl. Animal Planet’s annual Puppy Bowl embarked on its ninth installment as counter-programming to the NFL game, and this year it also took in its biggest audience ever. Animal Planet says that Puppy Bowl IX brought in more than 12.4 million unique P2+ viewers over the 12 hours that the Puppy Bowl marathon ran (the original two-hour run, then several re-airs), a record for the programming event. During the now-infamous blackout during […]

Just as the Super Bowl started out as a fairly small event and has now exploded into a global marketing phenomenon — and almost an unofficial holiday in America — so, too, has Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl grown into a commercial powerhouse of Great Dane size. The first airing of the Puppy Bowl in 2005 was intended as counter-programming to the Super Bowl, and was a pretty quiet, relatively low-key affair — almost ambient programming, just puppies at play, accompanied by some calming music. But, just as you can often tell how large a puppy will get by the size […]