King Felipe VI's Christmas speech, the second least watched since records began with an average of 6 million viewers

King Felipe VI's Christmas message, broadcast by 30 television channels, obtained an average audience share of 64.1% on Sunday, and was followed by an average of 6,044,000 viewers and a total audience of more than seven million unique viewers. According to data provided by Barlovento Comunicación and extracted from Kantar Media, it lost just over 600,000 viewers on average compared to last year. With these data, it becomes the second least watched in history since audiences began to be measured, in 1992.

The monarch called in his 2023 speech to prevent "the germ of discord" from re-establishing itself among Spaniards and asked in his Christmas message that the institutions of the State respect each other "in the exercise of their powers".

The decline in speech following is partly explained by the general drop in television consumption on Christmas Eve. Total television consumption this time was 9.4 million, close to 1 million (-9%) compared to 2022, Barlovento's analysis points out.

As usual, the main channel from which Felipe VI's words were followed was TVE's La 1, with an average of 2,129,000 million viewers and a 22.6% share of the screen. Antena 3, with 1,308,000 viewers and a 13.9% share, was second in this multichannel broadcast, followed by Telecinco, with 805,000 viewers and an 8.5% share. La Sexta attracted an average of 423,000 spectators and a 4.5% audience share, while Cuatro attracted 372,000 viewers and a 3.9% share. Murcia, Castilla-La Mancha and Aragon are the regions where it has had the most followers, according to their share of the screen, while Catalonia, the Basque Country and Asturias are the autonomous communities that have shown the least interest in it.

The follow-up to Felipe VI's speech began to emerge from 2017, the year of the independence challenge in Catalonia. And it reached its all-time high in 2020. It was the lockdown due to the coronavirus crisis and the most controversial for King Emeritus Juan Carlos I, who left Spain that summer after his bank accounts in tax havens were discovered. The audience's interest in knowing if the monarch mentioned the controversies related to his father and his words about the health emergency triggered the audimeters. Since then, the number of viewers has gradually decreased, coinciding with the arrival of new alternative broadcast windows to traditional television that offer content different from the King's Christmas message.

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