High-Wire Canyon Walk Drew 13 Million Viewers

On Sunday, as Nik Wallenda neared the finish of his death-defying high-wire walk across a gorge near the Grand Canyon, he thanked Eileen O’Neill and the other Discovery Channel executives who financed and televised the stunt.

On Monday, they were thanking him. During his 23-minute walk, about 13 million people were tuned to Discovery, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings that were trumpeted by the cable channel. Nothing else on television on Sunday night came close.

Another 300,000 or so watched the Web stream provided by Discovery, according to the channel. The high-wire walk was also televised around the world, but comparable ratings were not available.

The ratings for Mr. Wallenda’s walk across the gorge were more or less equal to the ratings on the night last year when he walked across Niagara Falls. That stunt, televised by ABC, peaked around 13.1 million viewers, setting a nearly five-year record for the broadcast network.

ABC required Mr. Wallenda to wear a safety harness, much to his dissatisfaction. Partly for that reason, Mr. Wallenda signed up with Discovery for his next televised spectacle. His walk on Sunday was produced by Peacock Productions, a unit of NBCUniversal’s NBC News, for Discovery, which is why two co-hosts of the “Today” show, Natalie Morales and Willie Geist, were the hosts of the program, titled “Skywire Live With Nik Wallenda.”

In the lengthy prelude to the event, Ms. Morales and Mr. Geist repeatedly emphasized that Mr. Wallenda would not wear a harness this time. “This was Nik’s decision and we honored it,” Laurie Goldberg, a Discovery spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. Discovery televised the walk on a 10-second delay, so the channel could have cut away had Mr. Wallenda fallen to the canyon floor.

Spurred by chatter on Twitter and Facebook, the audience of “Skywire Live” gradually grew from 8 to 9:30 p.m., then spiked around the time he started to walk at 9:38 p.m. The total audience between 9:38 and 10:01 p.m. was 12.98 million viewers.

Most, but not all, turned the channel after Mr. Wallenda was back on solid ground. Discovery aggressively promoted a new reality show called “Naked and Afraid” during the wire walk. Its premiere immediately afterward garnered an average of 4.16 million viewers, enough to make it the second-highest-rated new show in the channel’s history.

On Monday, Discovery described “Skywire Live” as its “highest-rated live event,” far surpassing its coverage of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from 128,100 feet in October. (It is difficult to draw exact comparisons between the two stunts because Mr. Baumgartner’s jump happened on a Sunday afternoon while Mr. Wallenda’s walk happened during prime time on the East Coast. Furthermore, the jump had a much bigger audience on the Web than the TV-centric wire walk did.)

At the end of Sunday’s program, Mr. Wallenda said that for his next stunt, he hoped to walk “between two skyscrapers in New York City.”