John McCain’s duty will be even more difficult than he expected. It won’t be easy at all for the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party to lure at least 38.4 million people into watching his acceptance speech due next week, as Barack Obama scored on Thursday night.

According to Nielsen Media Research estimates, Barack Obama’s speech, delivered between 10 and 11 p.m. at the Investment Management Company Field in Denver was the speech with the highest audience ever.

In addition to this, the historic speech by the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party attracted more viewers than the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Beijing, which drew an impressive 34.2 million U.S. viewers.

What’s more, practically one out of every five people who tuned in for the Obama speech, watched it on CNN. The cabler averaged over 8 million viewers during that certain hour, triumphing by far in what concerns the viewers’ network preferences for seeing the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party deliver his speech of acceptance.

ABC News claimed the second spot, with 6.6 million viewers, surpassing NBC News, which lured 6.1 million viewers. CBS News was on the fourth position with 4.6 million viewers, beating Fox News Channel (4.2 million viewers) and MSNBC (4.1 million viewers) by a hair’s breadth.

Barack Obama’s speech attracted almost 60 percent more viewers than John Kerry’s acceptance speech in 2004.

Furthermore, according to Nielsen estimates, while Al Gore drew approximately 22 million viewers with his acceptance speech 8 years ago, almost the same as George W. Bush’s speech at the Republican Convention, Barack Obama’s score of 38.4 million viewers made his lecture the most watched convention speech ever.

Although the audience size for earlier conventions’ speeches will never be known for sure, “it appears [Obama’s speech] is far and away the largest audience for an . . . acceptance speech since Nielsen instituted the People Meter, which was the first time we were able to have ‘persons’ data,” a Nielsen representative told The TV Column.