Home and Away and even Thursday Night Football couldn't stop more than 9000 viewers from tuning in to the 2022 Sire Shootout competition, which attracted 53* bulls from five different states.
By the Friday morning after the competition had wrapped up, at least 8917 views had been tallied on Queensland Country Life, The Land and Livestock Connect Facebook livestreams across the three nights while the online streams on all six agriculture mastheads totalled 371 viewers.
The bulls were inspected in the virtual world by people from at least four different countries during the viewer's choice competition, which attracted 468 votes.
While the catalogue of entries wasn't as big as the record 103 in 2021, all three classes judges, Hannah Powe, Ben Mayne and Andrew Bassingthwaighte, commended the quality, rather than the quantity of this year's competition.
"I know it wasn't easy conditions; it's been so wet around Australia and a lot of these videos you will see are people bogged down up to their ankles," Mr Bassingthwaighte said during his judging.
"I'd like to congratulate everyone on the fantastic cattle we had to look through and I really did have a lot of fun with it, sitting back and looking over the videos a 1000 times over."
Mr Mayne, who's Sire Shootout exhibit Texas Iceman went on to make the highest price of the 2021 entrants, said the quality of the bulls was quite outstanding right across the breeds.
"It added to some quite interesting discussions to see where we got to [with the winners]," he said during interbreed judging.
"I think the Sire Shootout is a wonderful idea and concept to be able to showcase some of the best genetics we have got on offer throughout the country and well done to you guys [ACM] for making up and delivering such a thing like the Sire Shootout."
In some interesting firsts, this year's competition attracted debut exhibitors from the Northern Territory and the first Braunvieh bull entry too. For the first time, all three judges had an influence on the final result using an interbreed scoring system.
- ACM will follow the Sire Shootout entrants' auction results to calculate a sale average for 2022 and award $500 in ACM advertising to the top price bull.