The 2017 ITTF Challenge Nigeria Open has garnered rave reviews from tennis body, International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) after more than 29.35m viewers watched the five-day tournament worldwide making it the ITTF Challenge with the most coverage globally.

The successes recorded has prompted the international table tennis body to put their weight behind the tournament while also confirming that next year’s edition will be held from August 8 to 12.

Nigeria Open is the second highest prize money tournament behind the Spanish Open on the ITTF Challenge series calendar and the latest edition attracted over 20 countries across the world.

The aforementioned statistics were revealed by CSM Media Research-KantarSport, which was contracted by ITTF to monitor television viewership of its tournaments.

According to the firm, over 29.35m watched Nigeria Open on Supersport Channels globally.

Kantarsport revealed that the Nigeria Open was mostly watched on Supersport channels via the following statement:
“The ITTF Challenge events, we found in our worldwide sports programs tracker (within all channels we monitor), the Belarus Open (aired on Belarus TV-5 Sports: that channel reaches 6.2 of the 6.9 m Belarussians), as well as the Nigeria Open 2017. The Nigeria Open was shown live and non-live on Super Sport 9 & Super Sport Blitz (South African channels) as well as on Pan-African channel Super Sport 5 (which we track in Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa). It might have been telecast too on some channels or OTT platforms that are not included into our tracke.

“Supersport 9 in South Africa is a PAY-TV channel received by 19.7% of all TV households (13.65 m TV HH / 45.00 m TV ind.) so it is available to a potential of 8.86 m. viewers. As for SuperSport 5, it reaches 11.4% or 5.13 m potential viewers. No such information is available for Nigeria (no measurement at all), nor Senegal (a French company just started measuring Dakar, 1.71 m TV users).” the statement further read.