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The BYU, Utah and Utah State football teams play a total of seven times on Friday nights this fall — a number that could increase in coming years, given some new ratings information.

Television programmers have complained for decades that the TV ratings don't account for people who watch TV somewhere other than at home. Like at a friend's house, a restaurant or a bar. But Nielsen is pioneering a system to measure out-of-home viewing, and the early results are great news for televised sports.

According Sports Business Journal, Fox is going gaga over the numbers from its telecast of the Washington-Dallas NFL game this past Thanksgiving. The out-of-home ratings pumped up the audience from a huge 35.1 million viewers to an astonishing 48.7 million. That's a increase of almost 39 percent, up to almost half a Super Bowl audience.

And while it's hard not to look sideways at a lot of TV ratings claims, this actually makes sense. If 35.1 million Americans were at home watching that game, it's not hard to believe another 13.6 million were at someone else's house on Thanksgiving watching a football game.

ESPN execs told SBJ's John Ourand they've seen similar increases for their Christmas Day NBA games.

Not all sportscasts showed that kind of a jump, but ESPN and Fox are seeing significant increases for both studio shows and live events. Fox also is enthusiastic about numbers indicating that, when out-of-home viewing is added, Games 3 (Friday) and 4 (Saturday) of the World Series had more viewers than Games 1 (Tuesday) and 2 (Wednesday).

That turns traditional TV thinking upside-down. Ratings consistently have shown that fewer people watch TV on weekends than midweek, and the thinking has been that people were out doing things on Friday and Saturday nights.

A lot of them apparently are out watching TV.

TV execs are excited about the possibility of increased ad rates, which doesn't affect us. Unless you happen to work at ESPN or Fox Sports.

But it could end up affecting when games are scheduled. It could mean that the Utes, Cougars and Aggies could play more often on Friday nights.

Fox Sports programmers already are talking about the possibility that the increased audience from out-of-home ratings could result in more Friday games.

"There's a path to Friday prime time being just as dominated by sports as Saturday prime time is right now," Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports' executive vice president of research, league operations and strategy, told SBJ. "But we're going to have to go through this out-of-home transition to get there and really take full advantage of that night."

Like with more college football games.

Utah plays Friday games at Arizona on Sept. 22 (FS1) and vs. UCLA on Nov. 3 (FS1).

BYU plays at Utah State on Sept. 29 (on CBSSN), at Boise State on Oct. 6 (ESPN) and at UNLV on Nov. 10 (ESPN2). In addition to the BYU game, USU plays at Wisconsin on Sept. 1 (ESPN).

I'm counting the BYU-USU game as two Friday appearances by local teams.

At this writing, CBS has not signed on for the out-of-home ratings, so we may not have any additional information on the BYU-USU game. Fox and ESPN — the two outlets that have deals with the Pac-12 — both have subscribed, so that information will be available to them. And, possibly, to us.

And somewhere down the road, the three local teams may total considerably more than seven Friday appearances.

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