O.J. CIVIL VERDICT DOESN'T DRAW AS MUCH NIELSEN JUICE.

Byline: Keith Marder Daily News Staff Writer

The first O.J. Simpson verdict may have been the most-watched television event ever, but the second verdict didn't gather even as much speed as the Bronco chase.

An estimated 45 million people watched TV coverage of the civil trial verdict this week, compared with about 100 million for the first verdict and 95 million on the prime-time broadcast of Simpson riding around Los Angeles in buddy Al Cowlings' Ford Bronco just before his arrest.

The number of viewers can only be estimated because cable networks and others, including Fox News, do not measure viewership. What the numbers do show is that ABC was the mainstream network with the highest ratings. For the 10 minutes beginning at 7:16 p.m. Tuesday, when the verdict was announced, ABC pulled a 9.4 rating/14 share, leading NBC at 8.6 rating/13 share; CBS, which had a 7.5 rating/11 share; and Fox, 3.2/5. One ratings point equals 970,000 households. Share is the percentage of all televisions which are tuned to the network being measured.

CNBC's ``Geraldo Live'' - the self-proclaimed O.J. show of record - drew a network record 3.2 household rating, equaling 1.9 million households measured over an extended 5-to-8 p.m. show. From 7:15 to 7:30 his rating spiked to 3.9, or 3.55 million households, to lead cable viewership of the Simpson verdict.

E! Entertainment television, which covered the criminal trial gavel-to-gavel and which has recently been running re-enactments of civil-trial testimony, got an average rating of 0.85, peaking at 1.8, a number more than three times any of its trial coverage to date. Each ratings point for E! is worth 427,000 households.

Other memorable O.J. TV moments

The Bronco chase and arrest of Simpson, June 17, 1994: An estimated 95 million viewers. Some of the coverage was watched by 67 percent of all households, or in 63 million homes. This was only 23 million less than the number of people who tuned in to watch coverage of the first day of the Gulf War on Jan. 16, 1991.

Opening statements, Jan. 24, 1995: Daytime audiences are generally lower than those in the evening and prime time, and still, 1.3 million of the Los Angeles market's 4.9 million homes viewed the proceedings on the six local broadcast stations. Several thousand were probably tuned into one of the many cable stations such as CNN, E! or Court TV. Nationally, CNN's ratings were seven times its usual daytime average. And during part of deputy district attorney Marcia Clark's opening statement, 4 million homes were tuned to CNN.

Nielsen also doesn't count televisions in places other than households, such as businesses where many people were at the time of the statement.

O.J. Simpson is acquitted, Oct. 3, 1995: Virtually 100 percent of homes were tuned into the verdict and the ratings were on par with the two most-watched news events in history: President Kennedy's funeral in 1963 and the first Apollo moonwalk in 1969.

The national ratings over commercial and broadcast stations were 42.9, and the share was 91.

Again, a precise number of viewers is impossible to calculate because many people were at businesses and schools, which aren't counted in with home viewership. A CNN poll of 1,000 adults, conducted by Opinion Research Corp., said that 100 million adults watched the first verdict. The figure went up to 142 million if you add radio, and an estimated 162 million watched the verdict live or on tape.