This year’s edition of Australian rugby league's iconic State of Origin series was the most-watched live streaming event in Australian history and attracted its biggest audience in three years.

The deciding game in the best-of-three series on Wednesday (July 13), in which the Queensland Maroons beat the New South Wales Blues 22-12 to win the trophy, attracted a national average audience of 2.6 million viewers on Nine, the commercial broadcaster.

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With an additional 463,000 tuning in on Nine’s streaming service 9Now, this took the total TV audience to just over 3 million viewers.

This represented the highest-rated State of Origin game on TV since 2019.

The 463,000 streaming figure was up 74% year-on-year, making it the highest ever live streaming event in Australian TV history.  

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The three matches set streaming audience records in the country with the games in Sydney, Perth, and Brisbane attracting the three largest live viewing figures of all time across all broadcasters as game one attracted 425,000 and game two 393,000.

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Mike Sneesby, Nine’s chief executive, said: “The growing scale of 9Now live audiences is now consistently delivering year on year total television audience growth for Nine across our key programming events.

“The Origin decider wrapped up a series that has seen the biggest audiences since 2019. Growth in live streaming on 9Now has accelerated, with record numbers of fans choosing to live stream the series.” 

Nine holds the rights to the best-of-three series in an exclusive deal struck last December that runs through 2027.

Under the deal, the network holds sole Australian free-to-air rights to the State of Origin, as well as the regular National Rugby League series, and to the NRL Grand Final.