This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The ratings for Saturday's Utah-BYU game were predictably huge here in Utah, but nothing to get excited about nationally.

In the Salt Lake TV market, the Utes' 20-19 win averaged a 28.0 rating and a 52.6 share. That means that, on average, 28 percent of the homes that have TVs here were watching the game, and 52.6 percent of the homes where someone was actually watching TV were tuned in.

That's a huge audience.

(Nielsen estimates there are 884,900 TV-equipped homes in the Salt Lake TV market, which includes all of Utah as well as parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada.)

The numbers rose steadily throughout the game (with the exception of a predictable dip at halftime), from a 20.0/43.8 to a whopping 34.9/58.8.

The highest rated show on any other local channel on Saturday (other than Ch. 13's 12.6 for its late news, which was inflated by the game) was KUTV-Ch. 2's 10 p.m. news, with a 5.6 rating — 20 percent of the game's rating.

Nationally, BYU-Utah averaged a 1.0 rating and 1.693 million viewers. That's not bad, but not great. ABC's competing Tennessee-Virginia Tech game averaged a 3.35 rating and 5.79 million viewers — although that's in line with how Fox does on Saturdays vs. ABC with college football.

(Local overnight ratings don't include total viewers.)

• WHEN THE UTAH-BYU GAME airs on a local station, it's used as a platform to promote the channel. KSTU-Ch. 13 did that with a pregame show that aired from 4-5 p.m.

But all the fumbles didn't happen on the field. Some of the segments in pregame were nicely handled — the pretaped segments, mostly — but, overall, the hour was sort of a mess.

The oddly good news for Ch. 13 is that the hour averaged just a 3.2 rating; the national Fox pregame from 5-5:30 p.m. averaged an 8.4 rating.

• UTAH FANS ACROSS THE COUNTRY can now go over the top and watch the Pac-12 Networks.

No, there's no news about DirecTV (for those of you still asking). But P12N has made a deal with Sling TV, a subsidiary of Dish Network that allows viewers to bypass cable or satellite subscriptions and get the channels online.

That's called "over the top" in TV lingo.

Sling TV is not free, but it's not super expensive. You need to subscribe to Sling Orange, the lowest-priced package ($20 per month), which features 28 channels (including ESPN and ESPN2). Then you'll have to pay an additional $5 per month for the Sports Extra package, which includes the Pac-12 Networks (as well as a the SEC Network, ESPNNews, ESPNU and several others).

That's $25 per month to get access to everything on the six regional Pac-12 channels. So if you're a fan of any of the 12 teams in the league and you live anywhere in the country, you can see your team every time it's on P12N.

That includes all the men's basketball games, which is an issue because not all of those will air across all the regional channels — or on the national P12N feed (which is not included). That proved to be a problem during the conference tournament last season.

So if you're a Utah fan living in Oregon, New York, Florida or anywhere in between, you're all set.

And Sling promises "no longterm contracts" and "easy online cancellation" — so if you're only interested in football, you can pay for September, October and November and then cancel.

Sling is also advertising a free seven-day trial if you want to check it out.

Scott D. Pierce covers TV for The Salt Lake Tribune. Email him at spierce@sltrib.com; follow him on Twitter @ScottDPierce.