KEY POINTS:
More than a million people tuned in for the most popular minutes of Saturday's Olympic coverage - more viewers than the hugely popular final episode of Dancing with the Stars.
Viewers swarmed to watch TV One as New Zealand hauled five medals in one Olympic day, making it the best day in our Olympic history.
TV One's audience peaked at 1.2 million viewers just after 9pm, when Kiwi rowers Nathan Cohen and Rob Waddell took on their men's final of the double scull.
Rowing's golden hours on Saturday evening kept viewers hooked for hours at a time. A surge of viewers tuned in just in time for Valerie Vili's shotput qualifier and the rowing medal races.
Figures from AGB Nielsen showed almost a million people watched from 7pm, as Mahe Drysdale, the Evers-Swindell twins and men's pair George Bridgewater and Nathan Twaddle bagged the first Kiwi medals of the Olympics.
And the big numbers didn't drop off until more than three hours later, when silver medal-winning cyclist Hayden Roulston had brought the Kiwi medal count to four.
Not all the TV One coverage went smoothly. Just as the biggest audiences were tuning in at just after 9pm, Kiwi rowers Nathan Cohen and Rob Waddell went missing from our screens when their lane was cut from the television coverage.
The BBC director in charge of the broadcast has apologised to TVNZ, after footage of lane 6 was cut during the crucial last seconds of the race.
At 10.30pm people began tucking up in bed, as the Olympic audience fell to about half a million. But a hardy quarter of a million were still watching at 1am Sunday, when Valerie Vili took the day's fifth medal, a shotput gold.
Even the All Blacks couldn't drag people away from the Olympics.
An early morning win 19-0 by the All Blacks over South Africa managed an average of just 133,800 viewers, less than half the number that tuned in to watch Vili. The rugby ran from 1.05am to just before 3am on Sky Sport 1.
